Producing high fidelity single photons with optimal brightness via waveguided parametric down-conversion

Parametric down-conversion (PDC) offers the possibility to control the fabrication of non-Gaussian states such as Fock states. However, in conventional PDC sources energy and momentum conservation introduce strict frequency and photon number correlations, which impact the fidelity of the prepared state. In our work we optimize the preparation of single-photon Fock states from the emission of waveguided PDC via spectral filtering. We study the effect of correlations via photon number resolving detection and quantum interference. Our measurements show how the reduction of mixedness due to filtering can be evaluated. Interfering the prepared photon with a coherent state we establish an experimentally measured fidelity of the produced target state of 78%.Comment: 15 pages, 10 Figures, published versio

Experimental generation of multi-photon Fock states

We experimentally demonstrate the generation of multi-photon Fock states with up to three photons in well-defined spatial-temporal modes synchronized with a classical clock. The states are characterized using quantum optical homodyne tomography to ensure mode selectivity. The three-photon Fock states are probabilistically generated by pulsed spontaneous parametric down conversion at a rate of one per second, enabling complete characterization in 12 hours.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Heralding two- and four-photon path entanglement on chip

Generating quantum entanglement is not only an important scientific endeavor, but will be essential to realizing quantum-enhanced technologies, in particular, quantum-enhanced measurements with precision beyond classical limits. We investigate the heralded generation of multiphoton entanglement for quantum metrology using a reconfigurable integrated waveguide device in which projective measurement of auxiliary photons heralds the generation of path-entangled states. We use four and six-photon inputs, to analyze the heralding process of two- and four-photon NOON states-a superposition of N photons in two paths, capable of enabling phase supersensitive measurements at the Heisenberg limit. Realistic devices will include imperfections; as part of the heralded state preparation, we demonstrate phase superresolution within our chip with a state that is more robust to photon loss

Multiband Spectrum Access: Great Promises for Future Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio has been widely considered as one of the prominent solutions to tackle the spectrum scarcity. While the majority of existing research has focused on single-band cognitive radio, multiband cognitive radio represents great promises towards implementing efficient cognitive networks compared to single-based networks. Multiband cognitive radio networks (MB-CRNs) are expected to significantly enhance the network's throughput and provide better channel maintenance by reducing handoff frequency. Nevertheless, the wideband front-end and the multiband spectrum access impose a number of challenges yet to overcome. This paper provides an in-depth analysis on the recent advancements in multiband spectrum sensing techniques, their limitations, and possible future directions to improve them. We study cooperative communications for MB-CRNs to tackle a fundamental limit on diversity and sampling. We also investigate several limits and tradeoffs of various design parameters for MB-CRNs. In addition, we explore the key MB-CRNs performance metrics that differ from the conventional metrics used for single-band based networks.Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures; published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Journal, Special Issue on Future Radio Spectrum Access, March 201

Low-complexity medium access control protocols for QoS support in third-generation radio access networks

One approach to maximizing the efficiency of medium access control (MAC) on the uplink in a future wideband code-division multiple-access (WCDMA)-based third-generation radio access network, and hence maximize spectral efficiency, is to employ a low-complexity distributed scheduling control approach. The maximization of spectral efficiency in third-generation radio access networks is complicated by the need to provide bandwidth-on-demand to diverse services characterized by diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements in an interference limited environment. However, the ability to exploit the full potential of resource allocation algorithms in third-generation radio access networks has been limited by the absence of a metric that captures the two-dimensional radio resource requirement, in terms of power and bandwidth, in the third-generation radio access network environment, where different users may have different signal-to-interference ratio requirements. This paper presents a novel resource metric as a solution to this fundamental problem. Also, a novel deadline-driven backoff procedure has been presented as the backoff scheme of the proposed distributed scheduling MAC protocols to enable the efficient support of services with QoS imposed delay constraints without the need for centralized scheduling. The main conclusion is that low-complexity distributed scheduling control strategies using overload avoidance/overload detection can be designed using the proposed resource metric to give near optimal performance and thus maintain a high spectral efficiency in third-generation radio access networks and that importantly overload detection is superior to overload avoidance