We experimentally map the transverse profile of diffraction-limited beams using photon-number-resolving detectors. We observe strong compression of diffracted beam profiles for high detected photon number. This effect leads to higher contrast than a conventional irradiance profile between two Airy disk-beams separated by the Rayleigh criterion.
The discrimination of non-orthogonal quantum states with reduced or without errors is a fundamental task in quantum measurement theory. In this work, we investigate a quantum measurement strategy capable of discriminating two coherent states probabilistically with significantly smaller error probabilities than can be obtained using non-probabilistic state discrimination. We find that appropriate postselection of the measurement data of a photon number resolving detector can be used to discriminate two coherent states with small error probability. We compare our new receiver to an optimal inter…
We experimentally demonstrate a new measurement scheme for the discrimination of two coherent states. The measurement scheme is based on a displacement operation followed by a photon number resolving detector, and we show that it outperforms the standard homodyne detector which we, in addition, proof to be optimal within all Gaussian operations including conditional dynamics. We also show that the non-Gaussian detector is superior to the homodyne detector in a continuous variable quantum key distribution scheme.
We investigate quantum measurement strategies capable of discriminating two coherent states probabilistically with significantly smaller error probabilities than can be obtained using non- probabilistic state discrimination. We apply a postselection strategy to the measurement data of a homodyne detector as well as a photon number resolving detector in order to lower the error probability. We compare the two different receivers with an optimal intermediate measurement scheme where the error rate is minimized for a fixed rate of inconclusive results. The photon number resolving (PNR) receiver i…
There has been much recent interest in quantum optical interferometry for applications to metrology, sub-wavelength imaging, and remote sensing, such as in quantum laser radar (LADAR). For quantum LADAR, atmospheric absorption rapidly degrades any quantum state of light, so that for high-photon loss the optimal strategy is to transmit coherent states of light, which suffer no worse loss than the Beer law for classical optical attenuation, and which provides sensitivity at the shot-noise limit. This approach leaves open the question -- what is the optimal detection scheme for such states in ord…
We put forward a hybrid quantum key distribution protocol based on coherent states, Gaussian modulation, and photon-number-resolving (PNR) detectors, and show that it may enhance the secret key generation rate (KGR) compared to homodyne-based schemes. Improvement in the KGR may be traced back to the dependence of the two-dimensional discrete output variable on both the input quadratures, thus overcoming the limitations of the original protocol. When reverse reconciliation is considered, the scheme based on PNR detectors outperforms the homodyne one both for individual and collective attacks. I…
There has been much recent interest in quantum metrology for applications to sub-Raleigh ranging and remote sensing such as in quantum radar. For quantum radar, atmospheric absorption and diffraction rapidly degrades any actively transmitted quantum states of light, such as N00N states, so that for this high-loss regime the optimal strategy is to transmit coherent states of light, which suffer no worse loss than the linear Beer's law for classical radar attenuation, and which provide sensitivity at the shot-noise limit in the returned power. We show that coherent radar radiation sources, coupl…
We present a method for the experimental measurement of nonclassicality witnesses and demonstrate its application. Our proposal only requires the coherent displacement of the initial state, which can be achieved by overlapping the latter with a coherent state at a beam splitter, and subsequent photon-number resolved detection. This setup allows a complete test of nonclassicality of an arbitrary quantum state. The role of the quantum efficiency as well as statistical and systematic uncertainties are discussed. Finally, the scheme is demonstrated for a realistic example.
Multiphoton interference effects can be measured with a single detector when two input photons are temporally well separated when compared with the dead time of the single-photon avalanche detector. Here we experimentally demonstrate that the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference effect can be observed with a single non-photon-number resolving detector via a time-delayed coincidence measurement of successive electrical signals from the detector. The two-photon interference experiment is performed by utilizing temporally well-separated pairwise weak coherent pulses and the interference fringes are succes…
The variance of difference of photocounts (VDPs) is an established measure of quantum correlations for quantum states of light. It enables us to discriminate between the classical correlation of a two-mode coherent state and the quantum correlation of a twin-beam state. We study the effect of loss and saturation of the photon-number-resolving detector on the measurement of the VDPs. An analytic function is derived for this variance, both for the coherent and the twin-beam states. It is found that the VDPs is no longer a reliable entanglement measure in the nonlinear regime of the detector resp…
A number of applications in basic science and technology would benefit from high fidelity photon number resolving photodetectors. While some recent experimental progress has been made in this direction, the requirements for true photon number resolution are stringent, and no design currently exists that achieves this goal. Here we employ techniques from fundamental quantum optics to demonstrate that detectors composed of subwavelength elements interacting collectively with the photon field can achieve high-performance photon number resolution. We propose a new design that simultaneously achiev…
We have created heralded coherent state superpositions (CSS), by subtracting up to three photons from a pulse of squeezed vacuum light. To produce such CSSs at a sufficient rate, we used our high-efficiency photon-number-resolving transition edge sensor to detect the subtracted photons. This is the first experiment enabled by and utilizing the full photon-number-resolving capabilities of this detector. The CSS produced by three-photon subtraction had a mean photon number of 2.75 -0.24/+0.06 and a fidelity of 0.59 -0.14/+0.04 with an ideal CSS. This confirms that subtracting more photons result…
We propose novel coherent-state phase concentration by probabilistic measurement-induced ampli- fication. The amplification scheme uses novel architecture, thermal noise addition (instead of single photon addition) followed by feasible multiple photon subtraction using realistic photon-number resolving detector. It allows to substantially amplify weak coherent states and simultaneously reduce their phase uncertainty, contrary to the deterministic amplifier.
We investigate how the entanglement properties of a two-mode state can be improved by performing a coherent superposition operation of photon subtraction and addition, proposed by Lee and Nha [Phys. Rev. A 82, 053812 (2010)], on each mode. We show that the degree of entanglement, the EPR-type correlation, and the performance of quantum teleportation can be all enhanced for the output state when the coherent operation is applied to a two-mode squeezed state. The effects of the coherent operation are more prominent than those of the mere photon subtraction and the addition particularly in the sm…
Number state filtered coherent states are a class of nonclassical states obtained by removing one or more number states from a coherent state. Phase sensitivity of an interferometer is enhanced if these nonclassical states are used as input states. The optimal phase sensitivity, which is related to the quantum Cramer-Rao bound (QCRB) for the input state, improves beyond the standard quantum limit. It is argued that removal of more than one suitable number state leads to better phase sensitivity. As an important limiting case in this context, the even and odd coherent states, where the odd and …
We propose a near-optimum receiver for the discrimination of binary phase-shift-keyed coherent states employing photon-number-resolving detectors. The receiver exploits a discrimination strategy based on both the so-called homodyne-like and the direct detection, thus resulting in a hybrid scheme. We analyse the performance and the robustness of the proposed scheme under realistic conditions, namely, in the presence of inefficient detection and dark counts. We show that the present hybrid setup is near-optimum and beats both the standard-quantum-limit and the performance of the Kennedy receiver…
Local quantum uncertainty (LQU) and local quantum Fisher information (LQFI) are both two tools used to capture purely quantum correlations in multi-partite quantum systems. In this paper, we study these quantifiers in the case of multipartite Glauber coherent state which include the GHZ (Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger) and Werner states. We perform a comparative study between LQFI and LQU in an isolated system. Besides, by using the Kraus operator representation, we study the behavior of these quantifiers on the dephasing channel to investigate their performances under the decoherence effect. In …
Large dynamic range room temperature photon number resolving (PNR) detectors can be very useful for measuring very low light intensities and for analyzing multiphoton quantum states. In this paper we present a PNR detector based on the up-conversion (UC) of telecom signal into visible wavelength and on its detection by a thermoelectrically cooled multi-pixel silicon avalanche photodiodode (APD), also known as Silicon Photon Multiplier (SiPM). An efficiency of 4% is attained and the poissonian statistics of input coherent states is maintained up to approximately 20 simultaneous detections. The …
We present a method of directly obtaining the parity of a Gaussian state of light without recourse to photon-number counting. The scheme uses only a simple balanced homodyne technique, and intensity correlation. Thus interferometric schemes utilizing coherent or squeezed light, and parity detection may be practically implemented for an arbitrary photon flux. Specifically we investigate a two-mode, squeezed-light, Mach-Zehnder interferometer and show how the parity of the output state may be obtained. We also show that the detection may be described independent of the parity operator, and that …
We propose quantum receivers with optical squeezing and photon-number-resolving detector (PNRD) for the near-optimal discrimination of quaternary phase-shift-keyed coherent state signals. The basic scheme is similar to the previous proposals (e.g. Phys. Rev. A 84, 042328 (2012)) in which displacement operations, on-off detectors, and electrical feedforward operations were used. Here we study two types of receivers where one installs optical squeezings and the other uses PNRDs instead of on-off detectors. We show that both receivers can attain lower error rates than that by the previous scheme …
We present optimal schemes, based on photon number measurements, for Gaussian state tomography and for Gaussian process tomography. An $n$-mode Gaussian state is completely specified by $2 n^2+3n$ parameters. Our scheme requires exactly $2 n^2+3n$ distinct photon number measurements to tomograph the state and is therefore optimal. Further, we describe an optimal scheme to characterize Gaussian processes by using coherent state probes and photon number measurements. With much recent progress in photon number measurement experimental techniques, we hope that our scheme will be useful in various …
Collective excitation modes in solid state systems play a central role in circuit quantum electrodynamics, cavity optomechanics, and quantum magnonics. In the latter, quanta of collective excitation modes in a ferromagnet, called magnons, interact with qubits to provide the nonlinearity necessary to access quantum phenomena in magnonics. A key ingredient for future quantum magnonics systems is the ability to probe magnon states. Here we observe individual magnons in a millimeter-sized ferromagnet coherently coupled to a superconducting qubit. Specifically, we resolve magnon number states in sp…
We review and compare Bell-state measurement and quantum teleportation schemes using linear optics with three different types of resources, i.e., two-photon pairs, entangled coherent states and hybrid entangled states. Remarkably, perfect teleportation with linear optics is possible in principle based on a hybrid approach that combines two-photon pairs and entangled coherent states. It turns out that hybrid approach allows to perform Bell-state measurement and local Pauli operations in a deterministic way, while it requires photon number resolving measurements.
We present the reconstruction of the Wigner function of a classical phase-sensitive state, a pulsed coherent state, by measurements of the distributions of detected-photons of the state displaced by a coherent probe field. By using a hybrid photodetector operated above its photon-resolving regime, we obtained both the statistics at different values of the probe field and the values of the probe phase required to reconstruct the Wigner function.
With the progress of optical detection technology, the classical diffraction limit raised a hundred years ago has been continuously broken through. In previous experiments within fluorescence sources, one of the techniques used is detecting auto-correlation functions. The image is reconstructed by single-photon and multi-photon detecting intensities. By taking the joint intensity of more than one single-photon detectors into consideration, the point spread function of each photon emitter can be resolved even when the distance of their central position is below the classical diffraction limit. …
Entangled coherent states can be prepared remotely by subtracting non-locally a single photon from two quantum superpositions of coherent states, the so-called "Schroedinger's cat" state. Such entanglement can further be distributed over longer distances by successive entanglement swapping operations using linear optics and photon-number resolving detectors. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the performance of this approach to quantum repeaters for long distance quantum communications. Despite many attractive features at first sight, we show that, when using state-of-the-art photon counters…
We investigate the coherent energy transfer between two quantum systems mediated by a quantum bus. In particular, we consider the energy transfer process between two qubits, and how it can be influenced by using a third qubit or photons in a resonant cavity as mediators. Inspecting different figures of merit and considering both on and off-resonance configurations, we characterize the energy transfer performances. We show that, while the qubit-mediated transfer shows no advantages with respect to a direct coupling case, the cavity-mediated one is progressively more and more efficient as functi…
Photon-number-revolving (PNR) detection allows the direct measurement of the Wigner quasiprobability distribution of an optical mode without the need for numerically processing an inverse Radon transform [K. Banaszek and K. Wódkiewicz, Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 4344 (1996)]. In this work, we reproduced the seminal experiment of Banaszek et al. [Phys. Rev. A 60, 674 (1999)] of quantum tomography of a pure coherent state, and of a statistical mixture thereof, and extended it to the more general case of photon fluxes with much more than one photon per detection time. This was made possible by the use …
We present the generation and characterization of the class of bracket states, namely phase-sensitive mixtures of coherent states exhibiting symmetry properties in the phase-space description. A bracket state can be seen as the statistical ensemble arriving at a receiver in a typical coherent-state-based communication channel. We show that when a bracket state is mixed at a beam splitter with a local oscillator, both the emerging beams exhibit a Fano factor larger than 1 and dependent on the relative phase between the input state and the local oscillator. We discuss the possibility to exploit …
Recent evidence suggests that quantum effects may have functional importance in biological light-harvesting systems. Along with delocalized electronic excitations, it is now suspected that quantum coherent interactions with certain near-resonant vibrations may contribute to light-harvesting performance. However, the actual quantum advantage offered by such coherent vibrational interactions has not yet been established. We investigate a quantum design principle, whereby coherent exchange of single energy quanta between electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom can enhance a light-harvesting…
The Kennedy-like receiver is a quasi-optimal receiver employed in binary phase-shift-keyed communication schemes with coherent states. It is based on the interference of the two signals encoding the message with a reference local oscillator and on/off photodetection. We show both theoretically and experimentally that it is possible to extract useful information about the phase reference by Bayesian processing of the very same data sample used to discriminate the signals shot by shot. We demonstrate that the minimum uncertainty in phase estimation, given by the inverse of the Fisher information…
It is shown that the maximal phase sensitivity of a two-path interferometer with high-intensity coherent light and squeezed vacuum in the input ports can be achieved by photon-number-resolving detection of only a small number of photons in a dark output port. It is then possible to achieve the quantum Cramér-Rao bound of the two-path interferometer using only the field displacement dependence of the photon number statistics in the single mode output of the dark port represented by a field-displaced squeezed vacuum state. We find that, at small field displacements, it is not sufficient to use t…
Solid-state quantum coherent devices are quickly progressing. Superconducting circuits, for instance, have already been used to demonstrate prototype quantum processors comprising a few tens of quantum bits. This development also revealed that a major part of decoherence and energy loss in such devices originates from a bath of parasitic material defects. However, neither the microscopic structure of defects nor the mechanisms by which they emerge during sample fabrication are understood. Here, we present a technique to obtain information on locations of defects relative to the thin film edge …
Complementarity theory is the essence of the Copenhagen interpretation. Since the Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiments, the particle nature of photons has been intensively studied for various quantum phenomena such as anticorrelation and Bell inequality violation in terms of two-photon correlation. Regarding the fundamental question on these quantum features, however, no clear answer exists for how to generate such an entanglement photon pair and what causes the maximum correlation between them. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the physics of anticorrelation on a beam splitter using sub-Pois…
Near-optimal discrimination of displaced squeezed binary signals using displacement, inverse-squeezing, and photon-number-resolving detection
Information Support Force Engineering University(信息支援部队工程大学);Guangxi Key Laboratory of Multimedia Communications and Network Technology, Guangxi University(广西大学);Henan Key Laboratory of Quantum Information and Cryptography, SSF IEU(河南量子信息与密码学重点实验室);Wuhan Maritime Communication Research Institute(武汉海事通信研究所)
The high-fidelity analysis of many-body quantum states of indistinguishable atoms requires the accurate counting of atoms. Here we report the tomographic reconstruction of an atom-number-resolving detector. The tomography is performed with an ultracold rubidium ensemble that is prepared in a coherent spin state by driving a Rabi coupling between the two hyperfine clock levels. The coupling is followed by counting the occupation number in one level. We characterize the fidelity of our detector and show that a negative-valued Wigner function is associated with it. Our results offer an exciting p…
We propose an innovative strategy to discriminate between two coherent states affected by either uniform or gaussian phase noise. The strategy is based on a homodyne-like detection scheme with photon-number-resolving detectors in the regime of low-intensity local oscillator. The experimental implementation of the detection scheme involves two hybrid photodetectors, whose outputs are used in post processing to calculate the shot-by-shot photon-number difference. The performance of this strategy is quantified in terms of the error probability in discriminating the noisy coherent signals as a fun…