Temporal Mode Structure and its Measurement of Entangled Fields in Continuous and Discrete Variables

Xin Chen, Purdue University

Abstract

Field-orthogonal temporal mode analysis of optical fields was recently developed to form a new framework of quantum information science. But so far, the exact profiles of the temporal modes are not known, which makes it difficult to achieve mode selection and de-multiplexing. A novel feedback-iteration method which, combined with the stimulated emission method, can give rise to the exact forms of the temporal mode structure of pulsepumped spontaneous parametric processes both for high gain parametric process, which gives rise to quantum entanglement in continuous variables, and for the low gain case, which produces a two-photon entangled state for discrete variables. For the temporal mode analysis in high gain situations, the common treatment of parametric interaction Hamiltonian does not consider the issue of time ordering problem of interaction Hamiltonian and thus leads to the inaccurate conclusion that the mode structure and the temporal mode functions do not change as the gain increases. We use an approach that is usually employed for treating nonlinear interferometers and avoids the time ordering issue. This allows us to derive an evolution equation in differential-integral form. Numerical solutions for high gain situations indicate a gain-dependent mode structure that has its mode distributions changed and mode functions broadened as the gain increases. This will enable us to have a complete picture of the mode structure of parametric processes and produce high quality quantum sources for a variety of applications of quantum technology. To verify the feedback-iteration method which measures temporal mode structure directly, we measure the joint spectral density of photon pairs produced with the spontaneous parametric down-conversion process of a pulse-pumped PPKTP crystal. The measurement method is based on a stimulated emission process which significantly improves the measurement time and accuracy compared with old spectrally resolved photon coincidence measurement. With the measured joint spectral density, the amplitude of the temporal modes can be obtained with the mathematical tool of singular value decomposition and compared with those measured directly with the feedback-iteration method. Because the parametric amplifier is in essence a linear four-port device, it couples and linearly mixes two inputs before amplifying and sending them to two output ports. We show that for quadrature phase amplitudes, a parametric amplifier can replace beam splitters to play the role of mixer. We apply this idea to a continuous-variable quantum state teleportation scheme in which a parametric amplifier replaces a beam splitter in the Bell measurement. We show that this scheme is loss-tolerant in the Bell measurement process and thus demonstrate the advantage of parametric amplifiers over beam splitter in the applications in quantum measurement.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Ou, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Information science|Electrical engineering|Electromagnetics|Mathematics|Optics|Physics

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