The Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect ranks among the most notable quantum interference phenomena, and is central to many applications in quantum technologies. The fundamental effect appears when two independent and indistinguishable photons are superimposed on a beam splitter, which achieves a complete suppression of coincidences between the two output ports. Much less studied, however, is when the fields share coherence (continuous-wave lasers) or mode envelope properties (pulsed lasers). In this case, we expect the existence of two distinct and concurrent HOM interference regimes: the traditional HOM dip on the coherence length time scale, and a structured HOM interference pattern on the pulse length scale. We develop a theoretical framework that describes HOM interference for laser fields having arbitrary temporal waveforms and only partial overlap in time. We observe structured HOM interference from a continuous-wave laser via fast polarization modulation and time-resolved single photon detection fast enough to resolve these structured HOM dips.
We point out that the Sagnac effect can be measured by means of the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect. The latter is not sensitive to phase shifts, and thus the Hong-Ou-Mandel Sagnac effect hinges on the fact that the Sagnac effect is, fundamentally, a time delay, not a phase shift.
The Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer is a versatile tool for analyzing the joint properties of photon pairs, relying on a truly quantum interference effect between two-photon probability amplitudes. While the theory behind this form of two-photon interferometry is well established, the development of advanced photon sources and exotic two-photon states has highlighted the importance of quantifying precisely what information can and cannot be inferred from features in a Hong-Ou-Mandel interference trace. Here we examine Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with regard to a particular class of states, so-ca…
We study temporal correlations of interfering quasi-thermal fields, obtained by scattering laser radiation on a rotating ground glass disk. We show that the Doppler effect causes oscillations in temporal cross-correlation function. Furthermore, we propose how to use Hong-Ou-Mandel interference of quasi-thermal fields in the time domain to characterize linear optical circuits.
We report on a Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference experiment for quantum states with photon numbers per mode as large as 10^6 generated via high-gain parametric down conversion (PDC). The standard technique of coincidence counting leads in this case to a dip with a very low visibility. By measuring, instead of coincidence rate, the variance of the photon-number difference, we observe a peak with 99.99% visibility. From the shape of the peak, one can infer information about the temporal mode structure of the PDC radiation, including the degree of frequency/time entanglement.
Optical interferometry has been a long-standing setup for characterization of quantum states of light. Both the linear and the nonlinear interferences can provide information about the light statistics an underlying detail of the light-matter interactions. Here we demonstrate how interferometric detection of nonlinear spectroscopic signals may be used to improve the measurement accuracy of matter susceptibilities. Light-matter interactions change the photon statistics of quantum light, which are encoded in the field correlation functions. Application is made to the Hong-Ou-Mandel two-photon in…
Correlated photon pairs generated through spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) are a key resource in quantum optics. In many quantum optics applications, such as satellite quantum key distribution (QKD), a compact, high repetition rate pump laser is required. Here we demonstrate the use of a compact, GHz-rate diode-pumped three-element Kerr-lens-modelocked Ti:sapphire laser for the generation of correlated photon pairs at 790 nm. We verify the presence of indistinguishable photons produced via SPDC using Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interferometry and observe a dip in coincidence counts with …
The two-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference is a pure quantum effect which indicates the degree of indistinguishability of photons. The four-photon HOM interference exhibits richer dynamics in comparison to the two-photon interference and simultaneously is more sensitive to the input photon states. We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally an explicit dependency of the four-photon interference to the number of temporal modes, created in the process of parametric down-conversion. Moreover, we exploit the splitting ratio of the beam splitter to manipulate the interference between bunc…
The effect of a decoherence channel, such as a turbulent atmosphere, on the second order quantum interference in the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect is investigated. The investigation includes both theoretical analyses and an experimental implementation of the process. In our experiment, entangled input states are prepared with spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The atmospheric turbulence is modelled as a single-phase screen and simulated with a spatial light modulator according to the theory of Kolmogorov. We find both theoretically and experimentally that the HOM dip is unaffected when only…
Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference is demonstrated experimentally for entangled photon pairs in the Hermite-Gauss (HG) basis. We use two Dove prisms in one of the paths of the photons to manipulate the entangled quantum state that enters the HOM interferometer. It is demonstrated that, when entangled photon pairs are in a symmetric Bell state in the Laguerre-Gauss (LG) basis, then they will remain symmetric after decomposing them into the HG basis, thereby resulting in no coincidence events after the HOM interference. On the other hand, if the photon pairs are in an antisymmetric Bell state in …
The phenomenon of entanglement is the basis of quantum information and quantum communication processes. Entangled systems with a large number of photons are of great interest at present because they provide a platform for streaming technologies based on photonics. In this paper we present a device which operates with four-photons and based on the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference. The presented device allows to maximize the degree of spatial entanglement and generate the highly entangled four-dimensional Bell states. Furthermore, the use of the interferometer in different regimes leads to fast…
The Hong-Ou-Mandel interference dip is caused by an entangled state, a delocalized bi-photon state. We propose a method of detecting this entanglement by utilizing inverse Hong-Ou-Mandel interference, while taking into account vacuum and multi-photon contaminations, phase noise, and other imperfections. The method uses just linear optics and photodetectors, and for single-mode photodetectors we find a lower bound on the amount of entanglement.
Traditional ghost imaging experiments exploit position correlations between correlated states of light. These correlations occur directly in spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), and in such a scenario, the two-photon state used for ghost imaging is symmetric. Here we perform ghost imaging using an anti-symmetric state, engineering the two-photon state symmetry by means of Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. We use both symmetric and anti-symmetric states and show that the ghost imaging setup configuration results in object-image rotations depending on the state selected. Further, the object…
Near-infrared Hong-Ou-Mandel quantum interference is observed in silicon nanophotonic directional couplers with raw visibilities on-chip at 90.5%. Spectrally-bright 1557-nm two-photon states are generated in a periodically-poled KTiOPO4 waveguide chip, serving as the entangled photon source and pumped with a self-injection locked laser, for the photon statistical measurements. Efficient four-port coupling in the communications C-band and in the high-index-contrast silicon photonics platform is demonstrated, with matching theoretical predictions of the quantum interference visibility. Constitue…
Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference, the bunching of indistinguishable photons at a beam splitter, is a staple of quantum optics and lies at the heart of many quantum sensing approaches and recent optical quantum computers. Here, we report a full-field, scan-free, quantum imaging technique that exploits HOM interference to reconstruct the surface depth profile of transparent samples. We demonstrate the ability to retrieve images with micrometre-scale depth features with a photon flux as small as 7 photon pairs per frame. Using a single photon avalanche diode camera we measure both the bunched an…
We show that the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect from quantum optics is equivalent to the SWAP test, a quantum information primitive which compares two arbitrary states. We first derive a destructive SWAP test that doesn't need the ancillary qubit that appears in the usual quantum circuit. Then, we study the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect for two photons meeting at a beam splitter and prove it is, in fact, an optical implementation of the destructive SWAP test. This result offers both an interesting simple realization of a powerful quantum information primitive and an alternative way to understand and analyse th…
In this work we demonstrate spectral-temporal correlation measurements of the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference effect with the use of a spectrometer based on a photon-counting camera. This setup allows us to take, within seconds, spectral temporal correlation measurements on entangled photon sources with sub-nanometer spectral resolution and nanosecond timing resolution. Through post processing, we can observe the HOM behaviour for any number of spectral filters of any shape and width at any wavelength over the observable spectral range. Our setup also offers great versatility in that it is c…
We examine the precision limits of Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) timing measurements, as well as precision limits applying to generalized two-photon measurements. As a special case, we consider the use of two-photon measurements using photons with variable bandwidths and frequency correlations. When the photon bandwidths are not equal, maximizing the measurement precision involves a trade-off between high interference visibility and strong frequency anticorrelations, with the optimal precision occuring when the photons share non-maximal frequency anticorrelations. We show that a generalized measurement…
New methods are proposed to characterize the spectral-temporal distribution of single photons. The presented protocols take advantage of spectral filtering, frequency entanglement between two single photons the one of interest and a reference, followed by the generalized Hong, Ou and Mandel interferometer. The measurement of the coincidence probability in these different schemes reveals the chronocyclic Wigner, the pseudo-Wigner distribution and the spectrogram at the single-photon level.
We study the number of coincidences in a Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer exit whose arms have been supplemented with the addition of one or two optical cavities. The fourth-order correlation function at the beam-splitter exit is calculated. In the regime where the cavity length are larger than the one-photon coherence length, photon coalescence and anti-coalescence interference is observed. Feynman's path diagrams for the indistinguishable processes that lead to quantum interference are presented. As application for the Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer with two cavities, it is discussed the constru…
The question whether two indistinguishable particles are bosons or fermions can be answered by observing the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect on a beam splitter. However, already for three particles one can consider symmetries that are neither bosonic nor fermionic. In this work, we describe a simple method of identifying them experimentally and propose a measure of a genuine multipartite indistinguishability.
Interference between two completely independent photons lies at the heart of many photonic quantum information applications such as quantum repeaters, teleportation, and quantum key distribution. Here, we report the observation of Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference with two independent continuous-wave coherent light sources that are neither synchronized nor share any common reference. To prepare highly indistinguishable photons from two independent laser sources, we employ high-precision frequency-stabilization techniques using the 5S1/2(F=3)-5P1/2(F'=3) transition line of 85Rb atoms. We succes…
We report the experimental observation of a spatio-temporal Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference of bi-photon states of extremely high Schmidt number. Two-photon interference of 1500 spatial modes and a total of more than 3x10^6 spatio-temporal modes is evidenced by measuring momentum spatial coincidences between the pixels of the far-field images of two strongly multimode spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) beams propagating through a HOM interferometer. The outgoing SPDC beams are recorded onto two separate detectors arrays operating in the photon-counting regime. The properties of HO…
We present an efficient tool capable of measuring the spectral correlations between photons emerging from a Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer. We show that for our spectrally factorizable spontaneous downconversion source the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference visibility decreases as the photons frequency spread is increased to a maximum of 165 nm. Unfiltered, we obtained a visibility of $92.0 \pm 0.2 \%$. The maximum visibility was $97 \pm 0.2 \%$ after applying filtering. We show that the tool can be useful for the study of spectral correlations that impair high-visibility and high-fidelity multi-sourc…
The orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light, associated with a helical structure of the wavefunction, has a great potential for quantum photonics, as it allows attaching a higher dimensional quantum space to each photon. Hitherto, however, the use of OAM has been hindered by its difficult manipulation. Here, exploiting the recently demonstrated spin-OAM information transfer tools, we report the first observation of the Hong-Ou-Mandel coalescence of two incoming photons having nonzero OAM into the same outgoing mode of a beam-splitter. The coalescence can be switched on and off by varying the i…
Recently, different experimental methods to investigate the entangled two-photon absorption (ETPA) process in a variety of materials have been reported. The present work reports on a different approach on which the ETPA process is detected based on the changes induced on the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interferogram of two photons produced by a spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) Type-II process. Using an organic solution of the laser dye Rhodamine B as a model, it is demonstrated that ETPA at 800nm can be monitored by the changes in the temporal-width and visibility of the HOM interferogra…
We show that sub-attosecond delays and sub-Angstrom optical path differences can be measured by using Hong-Ou-Mandel interference measurements with x-rays. We propose to use a system comprising a source based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion for the generation of broadband x-ray photon pairs and a multilayer-based interferometer. The correlation time of the photon pairs and the Hong-Ou-Mandel dip are shorter than 1 attosecond, hence the precision of the measurements is expected to be better than 0.1 attosecond. We anticipate that the scheme we describe in this work will lead to the de…
Storing and release of a quantum light pulse in a medium of atoms in the tripod configuration are studied. Two complementary sets of control fields are defined, which lead to independent and complete photon release at two stages. The system constitutes a new kind of a flexible beam splitter in which the input and output ports concern photons of the same direction but well separated in time. A new version of Hong-Ou-Mandel interference is discussed.
We report direct evidence of the bosonic nature of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in a scattering-based beamsplitter. A parametric down-conversion source is used to produce two indistinguishable photons, each of which is converted into a SPP on a metal-stripe waveguide and then made to interact through a semi-transparent Bragg mirror. In this plasmonic analog of the Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment, we measure a coincidence dip with a visibility of 72%, a key signature that SPPs are bosons and that quantum interference is clearly involved.
We introduce new sophisticated attacks with a Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer against quantum key distribution (QKD) and propose a new QKD protocol grafted with random basis shuffling to block up those attacks. When the polarization basis is randomly and independently shuffled by sender and receiver, the new protocol can overcome the attacks even for not-so-weak coherent pulses. We estimate the number of photons to guarantee the security of the protocol.
We propose a new interferometric setup which displays a completely destructive generalized N-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. The key property of this scheme is that is does not require any optical elements like beam splitters or integrated waveguide structures. The interference is intrinsically produced by the evolution of N photons in free space when emitted by N identical statistically independent single photon sources and measured by N detectors in the far field. In this sense the setup is a most simple and natural implementation of the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference effect, i.e., of a com…
We discuss characterization of single-photon wave packets by measuring Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with a weak coherent pulse. A complete multimode calculation is presented and effects of multiphoton terms in the coherent field as well as the impact of source and detection imperfections are discussed.
Guided-wave platforms such as fiber and silicon-on-insulator waveguide show great advances over traditional free space implementations in quantum information technology for significant advantages of low transmission loss, low cost, integrability and compatible with mature fiber communication systems. Interference between independent photon sources is the key to realize complex quantum systems for more sophisticated applications such as multi-photon entanglement generation and quantum teleportation. In this work, we report Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between two independent all fiber photon pai…
Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometers are valuable tools in many Quantum Information and Quantum Optics applications that require photon indistinguishability. The theoretical limit for the Hong-Ou-Mandel visibility is 0.5 for indistinguishable weak coherent photon states, but several device imperfections may hinder achieving this value experimentally. In this work, we examine the dependence of the interference visibility on various factors, including (i) detector side imperfections due to after-pulses, (ii) mismatches in the intensities and states of polarization of the input signals, and (iii) the o…
We propose an experimental scheme to implement a second-order nonlocal superposition operation and its variants by way of Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. The second-order coherent operations enable us to generate a NOON state with high particle number in a heralded fashion and also can be used to enhance the entanglement properties of continuous variable states. We discuss the feasibility of our proposed scheme considering realistic experimental conditions such as on-off photodetectors with nonideal efficiency and imperfect single-photon sources.
When two indistinguishable photons are each incident on separate input ports of a beamsplitter they `bunch' deterministically, exiting via the same port as a direct consequence of their bosonic nature. This two-photon interference effect has long-held the potential for application in precision measurement of time delays, such as those induced by transparent specimens with unknown thickness profiles. However, the technique has never achieved resolutions significantly better than the few femtosecond (micron)-scale other than in a common-path geometry that severely limits applications. Here we de…
Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect is known to be one of the main phenomena in quantum optics. The effect occurs when two identical single-photon waves enter a 1:1 beam splitter, one in each input port. When the photons are identical, they will extinguish each other. One of the main elements of the HOM interferometer is the beam splitter, which has its own coefficients of reflection $R = 1/2$ and transmission $ T = 1/2 $. In this work, the general mechanism of the interaction of two photons in a beam splitter is considered using an analytical solution, which shows that in the HOM theory of the effect…
We study how the information of the beam path is related to the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with two pulsed light sources. Through a simple model in which two photons in the form of pulses pass a beamsplitter and are observed at two detectors, we investigate how, during the measurement process, information about the paths of the two photons can be erased. There are two ways to clear the information of the beam path, the first being that from the beginning, during the physical measurement process, the time information is not obtained. The other is after measuring the information, to erase the t…
We provide a statistically robust and accurate framework to measure and track the polarisation state of light employing Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. This is achieved by combining the concepts of maximum likelihood estimation and Fisher information applied to photon detection events. Such an approach ensures that the Cramér-Rao bound is saturated and changes to the polarisation state are established in an optimal manner. Using this method, we show that changes in the linear polarisation state can be measured with 0.6 arcminute precision (0.01 degrees).
We present Hong-Ou-Mandel interference of single photons generated via two different physical processes by two independent atomic systems: scattering by a single atom, and parametric generation via four-wave mixing in a cloud of cold atoms. Without any spectral filtering, we observe a visibility of V=62$\pm$4%. After correcting for accidental coincidences, we obtain V=93$\pm$6%. The observed interference demonstrates the compatibility of the two sources, forming the basis for an efficient quantum interface between different physical systems.
The uses of a silicon-pixel camera with very good time resolution ($\sim$nanosecond) for detecting multiple, bunched optical photons is explored. We present characteristics of the camera and describe experiments proving its counting capabilities. We use a spontaneous parametric down-conversion source to generate correlated photon pairs, and exploit the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference effect in a fiber-coupled beam splitter to bunch the pair onto the same output fiber. It is shown that the time and spatial resolution of the camera enables independent detection of two photons emerging simultaneously…
We review some recent experiments based upon multimode two-photon interference of photon pairs created by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The new element provided by these experiments is the inclusion of the transverse spatial profiles of the pump, signal and idler fields. We discuss multimode Hong-Ou-Mandel interference, and show that the transverse profile of the pump beam can be manipulated in order to control two-photon interference. We present the basic theory and experimental results as well as several applications to the field of quantum information.
We extensively discuss the Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment taking an original phase-space-based perspective. For this, we analyze time and frequency variables as quantum continuous variables in perfect analogy with position and momentum of massive particles or with the electromagnetic field's quadratures. We discuss how this experiment can be used to directly measure the time-frequency Wigner function and implement logical gates in these variables. We also briefly discuss the quantum/classical aspects of this experiment providing a general expression for intensity correlations that explicit the diff…
We consider realistic photodetection in a generalization of the Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment to the multimode case. The basic layout of this experiment underlies boson sampling -- a promising model of nonuniversal quantum computations. Peculiarities of photocounting probabilities in such an experiment witness important nonclassical properties of electromagnetic field related to indistinguishability of boson particles. In practice, these probabilities are changed from their theoretical values due to the imperfect ability of realistic detectors to distinguish numbers of bunched photons. We derive a…
We apply the theory of semiparametric estimation to a Hong-Ou-Mandel interference experiment with a spectrally entangled two-photon state generated by spontaneous parametric downconversion. Thanks to the semiparametric approach we can evaluate the Cramér-Rao bound and find an optimal estimator for a particular parameter of interest without assuming perfect knowledge of the two-photon wave function, formally treated as an infinity of nuisance parameters. In particular, we focus on the estimation of the Hermite-Gauss components of the marginal symmetrised wavefunction, whose Fourier transform go…
Two-photon interference effects, such as the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect, can be used to characterize to what extent two photons are identical. Furthermore, these interference effects underly linear optics quantum computation. We show here how nonlinear optical effects, such as those mediated by atoms or quantum dots in a cavity, degrade the interference. This implies that, on the one hand, nonlinearities are to be avoided if one wishes to utilize the interference, but on the other hand, one may be able to measure or detect nonlinearities by observing the disappearance of the interference.
Over the last several decades, quantum entanglement has been intensively studied for potential applications in quantum information science. The Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) dip is the most important test tool for direct proof of entanglement between paired photons, whose coincidence detection results in anticorrelation due to photon bunching on a beam splitter. Although anticorrelation is due to destructive quantum interference between paired photons, a wavelength-sensitive interference fringe has never been observed in any HOM-type experiments. Here, a typical HOM dip is investigated for entangled ph…
