Generation of degenerate, factorizable, pulsed squeezed light at telecom wavelengths

• DOI: 10.1364/oe.19.024434
• Publication Date: 2011-11-16T15:30:31Z
• Authors: Thomas Gerrits; Martin J. Stevens; Burm Baek; Brice Calkins; Adriana Lita; Scott Glancy; Emanuel Knill; Sae Woo Nam; Richard P. Mirin; Robert H. Hadfield; Ryan S. Bennink; Warren P. Grice; Sander Dorenbos; Tony Zijlstra; Teun Klapwijk; Val Zwiller
• Keywords: Quantum Physics; photon statistics; FOS: Physical sciences; 535; Equipment Design; 01 natural sciences; quantum information and processing; Equipment Failure Analysis; Refractometry; squeezed states; quantum detectors; 0103 physical sciences; Telecommunications; Computer-Aided Design; quantum optics; Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Lighting; Physics - Optics; Optics (physics.optics)

We characterize a periodically poled KTP crystal that produces an entangled, two-mode, squeezed state with orthogonal polarizations, nearly identical, factorizable frequency modes, and few photons in unwanted frequency modes. We focus the pump beam to create a nearly circular joint spectral probability distribution between the two modes. After disentangling the two modes, we observe Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with a raw (background corrected) visibility of 86 % (95 %) when an 8.6 nm bandwidth spectral filter is applied. We measure second order photon correlations of the entangled and disentangled squeezed states with both superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors and photon-number-resolving transition-edge sensors. Both methods agree and verify that the detected modes contain the desired photon number distributions.