63 research outputs found
On-chip III-V monolithic integration of heralded single photon sources and beamsplitters
We demonstrate a monolithic III-V photonic circuit combining a heralded
single photon source with a beamsplitter, at room temperature and telecom
wavelength. Pulsed parametric down-conversion in an AlGaAs waveguide generates
counterpropagating photons, one of which is used to herald the injection of its
twin into the beamsplitter. We use this configuration to implement an
integrated Hanbury-Brown and Twiss experiment, yielding a heralded second-order
correlation that confirms single-photon
operation. The demonstrated generation and manipulation of quantum states on a
single III-V semiconductor chip opens promising avenues towards real-world
applications in quantum information
Tensor network states in time-bin quantum optics
The current shift in the quantum optics community towards large-size
experiments -- with many modes and photons -- necessitates new classical
simulation techniques that go beyond the usual phase space formulation of
quantum mechanics. To address this pressing demand we formulate linear quantum
optics in the language of tensor network states. As a toy model, we extensively
analyze the quantum and classical correlations of time-bin interference in a
single fiber loop. We then generalize our results to more complex time-bin
quantum setups and identify different classes of architectures for
high-complexity and low-overhead boson sampling experiments
Joint estimation of phase and phase diffusion for quantum metrology
Phase estimation, at the heart of many quantum metrology and communication
schemes, can be strongly affected by noise, whose amplitude may not be known,
or might be subject to drift. Here, we investigate the joint estimation of a
phase shift and the amplitude of phase diffusion, at the quantum limit. For
several relevant instances, this multiparameter estimation problem can be
effectively reshaped as a two-dimensional Hilbert space model, encompassing the
description of an interferometer phase probed with relevant quantum states --
split single-photons, coherent states or N00N states. For these cases, we
obtain a trade-off bound on the statistical variances for the joint estimation
of phase and phase diffusion, as well as optimum measurement schemes. We use
this bound to quantify the effectiveness of an actual experimental setup for
joint parameter estimation for polarimetry. We conclude by discussing the form
of the trade-off relations for more general states and measurements.Comment: Published in Nature Communications. Supplementary Information
available at
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140404/ncomms4532/extref/ncomms4532-s1.pd
Interfacing GHz-bandwidth heralded single photons with a room-temperature Raman quantum memory
Photonics is a promising platform for quantum technologies. However, photon
sources and two-photon gates currently only operate probabilistically.
Large-scale photonic processing will therefore be impossible without a
multiplexing strategy to actively select successful events. High
time-bandwidth-product quantum memories - devices that store and retrieve
single photons on-demand - provide an efficient remedy via active
synchronisation. Here we interface a GHz-bandwidth heralded single-photon
source and a room-temperature Raman memory with a time-bandwidth product
exceeding 1000. We store heralded single photons and observe a clear influence
of the input photon statistics on the retrieved light, which agrees with our
theoretical model. The preservation of the stored field's statistics is limited
by four-wave-mixing noise, which we identify as the key remaining challenge in
the development of practical memories for scalable photonic information
processing
Enhancing multiphoton rates with quantum memories
Single photons are a vital resource for optical quantum information
processing. Efficient and deterministic single photon sources do not yet exist,
however. To date, experimental demonstrations of quantum processing primitives
have been implemented using non-deterministic sources combined with heralding
and/or postselection. Unfortunately, even for eight photons, the data rates are
already so low as to make most experiments impracticable. It is well known that
quantum memories, capable of storing photons until they are needed, are a
potential solution to this `scaling catastrophe'. Here, we analyze in detail
the benefits of quantum memories for producing multiphoton states, showing how
the production rates can be enhanced by many orders of magnitude. We identify
the quantity as the most important figure of merit in this connection,
where and are the efficiency and time-bandwidth product of the
memories, respectively.Comment: Just over 4 pages, 2 figure
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