Abstract
In classical optics, interference occurs between two optical fields when they are indistinguishable from one another. The same holds true in quantum optics, where a particular experiment, the Franson interferometer, involves the interference of a photon pair with a time-delayed version of itself. The canonical version of this interferometer requires that the time delay be much shorter than the coherence length of the pump used to generate the photon pair, so as to guarantee indistinguishability. However, when this time delay is comparable to the coherence length, conventional wisdom suggests that interference visibility degrades significantly. In this work, though, we show that the interference visibility can be restored through judicious temporal post-selection. Utilizing correlated photon pairs generated by a pump whose pulsewidth (460 ps) is shorter than the interferometer’s time delay (500 ps), we are able to observe a fringe visibility of 97.4±4.3%. We believe this new method can be used for the encoding of high-dimensional quantum information in the temporal domain.
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Eric Y. Zhu received his bachelor's degree in engineering physics and Ph.D degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto. He received further postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. His current research interests include quantum optics, laser spectroscopy, and biophotonics.
Costantino Corbari graduated from the University of Milan, Faculty of Physics, with a thesis on electronic speckle pattern interferometry under the supervision of Prof. M. Giglio. In 2001 he was awarded a PhD scholarship by Pirelli cables & systems and went on to obtain his Ph.D. degree from the Optoelectronics Research Centre in Southampton, UK. He worked at the ORC within Prof. P. G. Kazansky’s physical optics group until April 2015. Costantino has authored or co-authored 89 research papers encompassing laser interferometry, laser machining in glass, non-linear optics and the physics and applications of glass poling. He designed and built a precision laser machining workstation for the fabrication of 30-cm long periodically poled fibres. His non-linear fibre devices have been used as a source of entangled photons and for the demonstration of all-fibre frequency doubled lasers producing in excess of 2W second-harmonic average power from a single poled fibre. Throughout his career, Costantino had the pleasure of learning several optical techniques and developed a keen interest in their application. Costantino currently works for the metrology company Renishaw where he leads the Optical Systems team in the Laser and Calibration Product Division. He continues to pursue his interests in optical engineering and contributes to the design and verification of Renishaw’s multi-axis laser calibrators and laser-encoders products range.
Alexey V. Gladyshev received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in laser physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Dolgoprudny, Russia, in 2001, and the Ph.D. degree in laser physics from the Fiber Optics Research Center, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, in 2005. Since 2005, he has been with the Fiber Optics Research Center, Moscow, as a senior research scientist. His interests include fiber optics, nonlinear optics, and quantum optics.
Peter G. Kazansky studied physics in Moscow State University and received the Ph.D. degree from the General Physics Institute (GPI) in 1985. From 1989 to 1993 he led a group in the GPI, which unravelled the mystery of light-induced frequency doubling in glass. In 1992 he joined the ORC at the University of Southampton where since 2001 he is a professor pursuing his interests in new optical materials and phenomena including glass and fiber poling. More recently he pioneered the field of ultrafast laser nanostructuring in glass leading to invention of “5D memory crystal”, which holds a Guinness world record for the most durable data storage medium. From 2014 he is also a director of the International Centre of Laser Technologies in Mendeleev University of Chemical Technologies. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.
Li Qian (Ph.D., University of Toronto) is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on novel fibre-optic devices and systems, including fibre sensing, nonlinear fibre optics and quantum optical sources based on periodically poled fiber. She also works on experimental quantum key distribution systems over fibre networks.
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Zhu, E.Y., Corbari, C., Gladyshev, A.V. et al. Franson interferometry with a single pulse. Front. Optoelectron. 11, 148–154 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12200-018-0809-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12200-018-0809-x