Experimental quantum polarimetry using heralded single photons

Abstract

We perform experimental quantum polarimetry by relying on heralded single-photon to analyze the optical activity for linearly polarized light traversing a chiral medium. Three kind of measurable quantities are considered to estimate the concentration of sucrose solutions from measuring the rotation angle of the linear polarization of the output photons. Through repetition of independent and identical measurements performed for each individual scheme and different concentrations of sucrose solutions, we compare the estimation errors among the three schemes. Results are also compared to classical benchmarks for which a coherent state of light is taken into account. The quantum enhancement in the estimation error is evaluated and the impact of experimental and technical imperfections is discussed. With our work, we lay out a route for future applications relying on quantum polarimetry.

Quantum Polarimetry

“…No enhanced scaling with 𝐻 is possible, so the improvements are not as dramatic as for enhanced rotation sensing and can equally be achieved with 𝑁 single-photon states or a single 𝑁-photon state. This has been demonstrated with single photons heralded using spontaneous parametric downconversion (Brida et al, 2010;Moreau et al, 2017;Sabines-Chesterking et al, 2017;Samantaray et al, 2017;Whittaker et al, 2017;Yabushita and Kobayashi, 2004;Yoon et al, 2020).…”

“…Polarimetry and its relative ellipsometry (Azzam, 2011) do just that: they characterize substances by the unique changes they impart on light's polarization degrees of freedom (Collett, 1992). Highly precise measurements of polarization and its changes, i.e., polarimetry, have found applications in photonics (Yoon et al, 2020), bioimaging (Dulk et al, 1994;Firdous and Anwar, 2016;Ghosh et al, 2009;Tuchin, 2016), oceanography (Voss and Fry, 1984), remote sensing (Tyo et al, 2006), astronomy (Dulk et al, 1994;Tinbergen, 2005), and beyond.…”

“…Quantum polarization has been used for quantum key distribution (Bennett et al, 1992;Muller et al, 1993), Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen tests (Kwiat et al, 1995), quantum teleportation (Bouwmeester et al, 1997), quantum tomography (James et al, 2001), weak value amplification (Hallaji et al, 2017), and more. However, the study of the changes in quantum polarization have not, to our knowledge, been the focus of any major review, which is a void that must especially be filled due to the proliferation of recent experiments on polarimetry with explicitly quantum mechanical states of light (Altepeter et al, 2011;Bogdanov et al, 2004;Daryanoosh et al, 2018;Graham et al, 2006;Mitchell et al, 2004;Oza et al, 2010;Rosskopf et al, 2020;Slussarenko et al, 2017;Sun et al, 2020;Toussaint et al, 2004;Yoon et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2021). We set forth to present a complete picture of quantum polarimetry in this work.…”

Bell inequality in chiral liquids

“…A keen interest exists in the measurement of the optical activity of chiral materials as chirality plays an important role in a variety of fields, including physics, biology, chemistry, and materials science. [1][2][3][4] One of the methods by which chirality can be tested is through the interaction of a linearly polarised beam of light. This interaction results in a measurable rotation in the polarisation of the transmitted light beam.…”

“…5 It is important to note that in a classical detection scheme used to measure the optical activity of a chiral medium, the precision of the measurement increases with the intensity of the light used. 4 However, this becomes problematic in situations where the intensity of the incident light might cause damage to the sample (for example, when measuring the chirality of samples containing proteins 3 ) or triggers unwanted chemical reactions (such as in the probing of molecular material). Alternatively, a quantum detection scheme uses spontaneous parametric down-converted (SPDC) photons as the light source.…”