Near-infrared Hong-Ou-Mandel interference on a silicon quantum photonic circuit

Near-infrared Hong-Ou-Mandel quantum interference is observed in silicon nanophotonic directional couplers with raw visibilities on-chip at 90.5%. Spectrally-bright 1557-nm two-photon states are generated in a periodically-poled KTiOPO4 waveguide chip, serving as the entangled photon source and pumped with a self-injection locked laser, for the photon statistical measurements. Efficient four-port coupling in the communications C-band and in the high-index-contrast silicon photonics platform is demonstrated, with matching theoretical predictions of the quantum interference visibility. Constituents for the residual quantum visibility imperfection are examined, supported with theoretical analysis of the sequentially-triggered multipair biphoton contribution and techniques for visibility compensation, towards scalable high-bitrate quantum information processing and communications.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Coherent controllers for optical-feedback cooling of quantum oscillators

We study the cooling performance of optical-feedback controllers for open optical and mechanical resonators in the Linear Quadratic Gaussian setting of stochastic control theory. We utilize analysis and numerical optimization of closed-loop models based on quantum stochastic differential equations to show that coherent control schemes, where we embed the resonator in an interferometer to achieve all-optical feedback, can outperform optimal measurement-based feedback control schemes in the quantum regime of low steady-state excitation number. These performance gains are attributed to the coherent controller's ability to simultaneously process both quadratures of an optical probe field without measurement or loss of fidelity, and may guide the design of coherent feedback schemes for more general problems of robust nonlinear and robust control.Comment: 15 pages, 20 figures. Submitted to Physical Review X. Follow-up paper to arXiv:1206.082

Experimental Long-Distance Decoy-State Quantum Key Distribution Based On Polarization Encoding

We demonstrate the decoy-state quantum key distribution (QKD) with one-way quantum communication in polarization space over 102km. Further, we simplify the experimental setup and use only one detector to implement the one-way decoy-state QKD over 75km, with the advantage to overcome the security loopholes due to the efficiency mismatch of detectors. Our experimental implementation can really offer the unconditionally secure final keys. We use 3 different intensities of 0, 0.2 and 0.6 for the pulses of source in our experiment. In order to eliminate the influences of polarization mode dispersion in the long-distance single-mode optical fiber, an automatic polarization compensation system is utilized to implement the active compensation.Comment: 4 pages,3 figure

Sub-picotesla widely tunable atomic magnetometer operating at room-temperature in unshielded environments

We report on a single-channel rubidium radio-frequency atomic magnetometer operating in un-shielded environments and near room temperature with a measured sensitivity of 130 fT/\sqrt{Hz}. We demonstrate consistent, narrow-bandwidth operation across the kHz - MHz band, corresponding to three orders of magnitude of magnetic field amplitude. A compensation coil system controlled by a feedback loop actively and automatically stabilizes the magnetic field around the sensor. We measure a reduction of the 50 Hz noise contribution by an order of magnitude. The small effective sensor volume, 57 mm^3, increases the spatial resolution of the measurements. Low temperature operation, without any magnetic shielding, coupled with the broad tunability, and low beam power, dramatically extends the range of potential field applications for our device.Comment: Main text: 6 pages, 9 figures. Supplementary material: 3 pages, 3 figures. Published version can be found at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5026769 . V2: Added journal layout, minor typos fixed. Content unchange