Highly indistinguishable heralded single-photon sources using parametric down conversion

Purifying Photon Indistinguishability through Quantum Interference

Indistinguishability between photons is a key requirement for scalable photonic quantum technologies. We experimentally demonstrate that partly distinguishable single photons can be purified to reach near-unity indistinguishability by the process of quantum interference with ancillary photons followed by heralded detection of a subset of them. We report on the indistinguishability of the purified photons by interfering two purified photons and show improvements in the photon indistinguishability of 2.774(3)% in the low-noise regime, and as high as 10.2(5)% in the high-noise regime.

Investigations of Molecular Optical Properties Using Quantum Light and Hong-Ou-Mandel Interferometry

Entangled photon pairs have been used for molecular spectroscopy in the form of entangled two-photon absorption and in quantum interferometry for precise measurements of light source properties and time delays. We present an experiment that combines molecular spectroscopy and quantum interferometry by utilizing the correlations of entangled photons in a Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interferometer to study molecular properties. We find that the HOM signal is sensitive to the presence of a resonant organic sample placed in one arm of the interferometer, and the resulting signal contains information pertaining to the light-matter interaction. We can extract the dephasing time of the coherent response induced by the excitation on a femtosecond time scale. A dephasing time of 102 fs is obtained, which is relatively short compared to times found with similar methods and considering line width broadening and the instrument entanglement time As the measurement is done with coincidence counts as opposed to simply intensity, it is unaffected by even-order dispersion effects, and because interactions with the molecular state affect the photon correlation, the observed measurement contains only these effects and no other classical losses. The experiments are accompanied by theory that predicts the observed temporal shift and captures the entangled photon joint spectral amplitude and the molecule's transmission in the coincidence counting rate. Thus, we present a proof-of-concept experimental method based of entangled photon interferometry that can be used to characterize optical properties in organic molecules and can in the future be expanded on for more complex spectroscopic studies of nonlinear optical properties.

Unified integration scheme using an N × N active switch for efficient generation of a multi-photon parallel state

A source to efficiently generate multiple indistinguishable single photons in different spatial modes in parallel (multi-photon parallel state) is indispensable for realizing large-scale photonic quantum circuits. "A naive scheme" may be to use a heralding single photon source with an on-off detector set at each of parallel modes and to select the cases where each mode contains one photon at the same time. However, it is also necessary to suppress the probability of generating more than two photons from a single-photon source. For this requirement, serial-parallel conversion and a multiplexed heralded single photon source (HSPS) have been proposed and demonstrated. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a novel method to produce a multi-photon parallel state efficiently using multiple HSPSs and an N × N active optical switch. As an advantage over the simple combination of a spatial multiplexed HSPS and a serial-parallel converter, our method, called the "unified integration scheme," can generate a multi-photon parallel state with minimized optical losses in the switch. Using a 2 × 2 active optical switch and a fixed delay, we achieve an enhancement factor of 1.59 ± 0.14, compared with a naive scheme using two HSPSs, and better than the factor of 1.46 using the simple combination scheme. Furthermore, we confirm the reduction of multi-photon events to 62 % of that of the naive scheme.

Generating Maximal Entanglement between Spectrally Distinct Solid-State Emitters

We show how to create maximal entanglement between spectrally distinct solid-state emitters embedded in a waveguide interferometer. By revealing the rich underlying structure of multiphoton scattering in emitters, we show that a two-photon input state can generate deterministic maximal entanglement even for emitters with significantly different transition energies and linewidths. The optimal frequency of the input is determined by two competing processes: which-path erasure and interaction strength. We find that smaller spectral overlap can be overcome with higher photon numbers, and quasimonochromatic photons are optimal for entanglement generation. Our work provides a new methodology for solid-state entanglement generation, where the requirement for perfectly matched emitters can be relaxed in favor of optical state optimization.

High visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel interference via a time-resolved coincidence measurement

A high visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between two independently prepared photons plays an important role in various photonic quantum information processing. In a standard HOM experiment using photons generated by pulse-pumped spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC), larger detection time windows than the coherence time of photons have been employed for measuring the HOM visibility and/or drawing the HOM dip. If large amounts of stray photons continuously exist within the detection time windows, employing small detection time windows is favorable for reducing the effect of background noises. Especially, such a setup is helpful for the HOM experiment using continuous wave (cw)-pumped SPDC and the time-resolved coincidence measurement. Here we argue that the method for determining the HOM visibility used in the previous cw experiments tends to suffer from distortion arising from biased contribution of the background noises. We then present a new method with unbiased treatment of the cw backgrounds. By using this method, we experimentally demonstrate a high visibility HOM interference of two heralded telecom photons independently generated by SPDC with employing cw pump light. An observed HOM visibility is 0.87 ± 0.04, which is as high as those observed by using pulse-pumped SPDC photons.

Implementation of a quantum controlled-SWAP gate with photonic circuits

Quantum information science addresses how the processing and transmission of information are affected by uniquely quantum mechanical phenomena. Combination of two-qubit gates has been used to realize quantum circuits, however, scalability is becoming a critical problem. The use of three-qubit gates may simplify the structure of quantum circuits dramatically. Among them, the controlled-SWAP (Fredkin) gates are essential since they can be directly applied to important protocols, e.g., error correction, fingerprinting, and optimal cloning. Here we report a realization of the Fredkin gate for photonic qubits. We achieve a fidelity of 0.85 in the computational basis and an output state fidelity of 0.81 for a 3-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. The estimated process fidelity of 0.77 indicates that our Fredkin gate can be applied to various quantum tasks.

Realization of multiplexing of heralded single photon sources using photon number resolving detectors

Heralded single-photon sources (HSPS) are widely used in experimental quantum science because they have negligibly small jitter and can therefore achieve high visibility for quantum interference. However, it is necessary to decrease the photon generation rate to suppress multi-photon components. To address this problem, two methods have been proposed and discussed: spatial (or temporal) source multiplexing and photon-pair number discrimination. Here, we report the experimental realization of a HSPS combining these two methods that can suppress the two-photon probability to 44.2 ± 0.7% of that of a normal HSPS. We also provide a theoretical analysis and a discussion of the effect of combining the two methods, considering a detector cascade as a practical photon number discriminating detector. The experimental results agreed well with the theoretical predictions.

Efficient and pure femtosecond-pulse-length source of polarization-entangled photons

We present a source of polarization entangled photon pairs based on spontaneous parametric downconversion engineered for frequency uncorrelated telecom photon generation. Our source provides photon pairs that display, simultaneously, the key properties for high-performance quantum information and fundamental quantum science tasks. Specifically, the source provides for high heralding efficiency, high quantum state purity and high entangled state fidelity at the same time. Among different tests we apply to our source we observe almost perfect non-classical interference between photons from independent sources with a visibility of (100 ± 5)%.

Synchronization of optical photons for quantum information processing

A fundamental element of quantum information processing with photonic qubits is the nonclassical quantum interference between two photons when they bunch together via the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect. Ultimately, many such photons must be processed in complex interferometric networks. For this purpose, it is essential to synchronize the arrival times of the flying photons and to keep their purities high. On the basis of the recent experimental success of single-photon storage with high purity, we demonstrate for the first time the HOM interference of two heralded, nearly pure optical photons synchronized through two independent quantum memories. Controlled storage times of up to 1.8 μs for about 90 events per second were achieved with purities that were sufficiently high for a negative Wigner function confirmed with homodyne measurements.

Spectrally resolved Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between independent photon sources

Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between independent photon sources (HOMI-IPS) is the fundamental block for quantum information processing. All the previous HOMI-IPS experiments were carried out in time-domain, however, the spectral information during the interference was omitted. Here, we investigate the HOMI-IPS in spectral domain using the recently developed fast fiber spectrometer, and demonstrate the spectral distribution during the HOM interference between two heralded single-photon sources, and two thermal sources. This experiment not only can deepen our understanding of HOMI-IPS from the viewpoint of spectral domain, but also presents a tool to test the theoretical predictions of HOMI-IPS using spectrally engineered sources.

An optimized photon pair source for quantum circuits

We implement an ultrafast pulsed type-II parametric down conversion source in a periodically poled KTP waveguide at telecommunication wavelengths with almost identical properties between signal and idler. As such, our source resembles closely a pure, genuine single mode photon pair source with indistinguishable modes. We measure the joint spectral intensity distribution and second order correlation functions of the marginal beams and find with both methods very low effective mode numbers corresponding to a Schmidt number below 1.16. We further demonstrate the indistinguishability as well as the purity of signal and idler photons by Hong-Ou-Mandel interferences between signal and idler and between signal/idler and a coherent field, respectively. Without using narrowband spectral filtering, we achieve a visibility for the interference between signal and idler of 94.8% and determine a purity of more than 80% for the heralded single photon states. Moreover, we measure raw heralding efficiencies of 20.5% and 15.5% for the signal and idler beams corresponding to detector-loss corrected values of 80% and 70%.