Independent high-purity photons created in domain-engineered crystals

Advanced photonic quantum technology relies on multi-photon interference which requires bright sources of high-purity single photons. Here, we implement a novel domain-engineering technique for tailoring the nonlinearity of a parametric down-conversion crystal. We create pairs of independently-heralded telecom-wavelength photons and achieve high heralding, brightness and spectral purities without filtering.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures Imprecise comparison with the experimental results in [28] has been remove

Tailored quantum light for photonic quantum technologies

Photonic quantum technologies rely on the deterministic preparation of qubits encoded in quantum states of light: advances in this field are therefore contingent with the development of reliable photon sources. In this Thesis, I address this challenge presenting a novel and versatile approach to single-photon generation based on nonlinearity engineering in parametric down-conversion. By tailoring the effective nonlinearity of a crystal, this scheme enables access to the spectral degree of freedom of photonic qubits with unprecedented precision, and translates into a number of different applications based on the manipulation of the biphoton spectral/temporal properties. A thorough theoretical and numerical description of such approach is provided and paired with experimental benchmarks conducted in three main experiments. The first experiment tackles the single-photon spectral purity problem in down-conversion sources: pure photons are in fact required for achieving perfect two-photon interference, a keystone of most quantum protocols. The second experiment demonstrates the feasibility of nonlinearity engineering to produce tailored entanglement encoded in the spectrum of biphoton states. Finally, the third experiment certifies the compatibility of this technique with different degrees of freedom, demonstrating hyperentanglement of spatially and spectrally structured quantum light. In conclusion, this Thesis stands as a cookbook for designing simple yet flexible and highly-efficient single-photon sources based on tailored parametric down-conversion processes

Experimental investigation on the geometry of GHz states

Nonclassical correlations arising in complex quantum networks are attracting growing interest, both from afundamental perspective and for potential applications in information processing. In particular, in an entanglementswapping scenario a new kind of correlations arise, the so-called nonbilocal correlations that are incompatible withlocal realism augmented with the assumption that the sources of states used in the experiment are independent.In practice, however, bilocality tests impose strict constraints on the experimental setup and in particular to thepresence of shared reference frames between the parties. Here, we experimentally address this point showing thatfalse positive nonbilocal quantum correlations can be observed even though the sources of states are independent.To overcome this problem, we propose and demonstrate a scheme for the violation of bilocality that does notrequire shared reference frames and thus constitutes an important building block for future investigations ofquantum correlations in complex network

Pure down-conversion photons through sub-coherence length domain engineering

Photonic quantum technology relies on efficient sources of coherent single photons, the ideal carriers of quantum information. Heralded single photons from parametric down-conversion can approximate on-demand single photons to a desired degree, with high spectral purities achieved through group-velocity matching and tailored crystal nonlinearities. Here we propose crystal nonlinearity engineering techniques with sub-coherence-length domains. We first introduce a combination of two existing methods: a deterministic approach with coherence-length domains and probabilistic domain-width annealing. We then show how the same deterministic domain-flip approach can be implemented with sub-coherence length domains. Both of these complementary techniques create highly pure photons, outperforming previous methods, in particular for short nonlinear crystals matched to femtosecond lasers.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. Minor update to Fig.

Design Considerations for High-purity Heralded Single Photon Sources

When building a parametric downconversion photon-pair source with spectrally separable photons, e.g. for making high-purity heralded single photons, two practical issues must be accounted for: the design of the experiment, and its characterization. To address experiment design, we study the impact on spectral separability of realistic (sech shaped and chirped) pump fields, realistic nonlinear crystals with fabrication imperfections, and undesirable PDC generation far from the central PMF peak coming from nonlinearity shaping methods. To address experiment characterization, we study the effect of discretization and spectral range of the measured bi-photon joint spectrum, the difference between inferring separability from the joint spectral amplitude vs. the joint spectral intensity, and advantages of interference experiments for purity characterization over methods based on the joint spectral intensity. This study will be of practical interest to researchers building the next generation of nonlinear sources of separable photon pairs.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figure

Direct Generation of Tailored Pulse-Mode Entanglement

Photonic quantum technology increasingly uses frequency encoding to enable higher quantum information density and noise resilience. Pulsed time-frequency modes (TFM) represent a unique class of spectrally encoded quantum states of light that enable a complete framework for quantum information processing. Here, we demonstrate a technique for direct generation of entangled TFM-encoded states in single-pass, tailored downconversion processes. We achieve unprecedented quality in state generation---high rates, heralding efficiency and state fidelity---as characterised via highly resolved time-of-flight fibre spectroscopy and two-photon interference. We employ this technique in a four-photon entanglement swapping scheme as a primitive for TFM-encoded quantum protocols.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 3 pages supplemental materia

Enhanced Multi-Qubit Phase Estimation in Noisy Environments by Local Encoding

The first generation of multi-qubit quantum technologies will consist of noisy, intermediate-scale devices for which active error correction remains out of reach. To exploit such devices, it is thus imperative to use passive error protection that meets a careful trade-off between noise protection and resource overhead. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that single-qubit encoding can significantly enhance the robustness of entanglement and coherence of four-qubit graph states against local noise with a preferred direction. In particular, we explicitly show that local encoding provides a significant practical advantage for phase estimation in noisy environments. This demonstrates the efficacy of local unitary encoding under realistic conditions, with potential applications in multi-qubit quantum technologies for metrology, multi-partite secrecy and error correction.Comment: 7 figure