The cat state is shown to `store' a single photon through the superposition of its orthogonal counterpart with itself, and an excited oscillator state. Photon addition leads to a $π$ phase shift at origin in the observed phase space interference of the Wigner function, which also displays negativity, controlled by the average photon number ($|α|^2$) of coherent states comprising the cat state. The maxima and minima of the sub-Planck tiles in the phase space of the kitten state are interchanged after photon addition, leading to their orthogonality. Interestingly, photon addition to Yurke-Stoler state characterized by Poissonian statistics leads to a sub-Poissonian distribution.
Based on two-photon entanglement, quantum remote sensing enables the measurement and detection to be done non-locally and remotely. However, little attention has been paid to implement a noncontact way to sense a real objects angular rotation, which is a key step towards the practical applications of precise measurements with entangled twisted photons. Here, we use photon pairs entangled in orbital angular momentum (OAM) to show that a real object's angular rotation can be measured non-locally. Our experiment reveals that the angular sensitivity of the object encoded with idler photons is prop…
Reducing the noise below the shot-noise limit in sensing devices is one of the key promises of quantum technologies. Here, we study quantum plasmonic sensing based on an attenuated total reflection configuration with single photons as input. Our sensor is the Kretschmann configuration with a gold film, and a blood protein in an aqueous solution with different concentrations serves as an analyte. The estimation of the refractive index is performed using heralded single photons. We also determine the estimation error from a statistical analysis over a number of repetitions of identical and indep…
Photonic spin density (PSD) in the near-field gives rise to exotic phenomena such as photonic skyrmions, optical spin-momentum locking and unidirectional topological edge waves. Experimental investigation of these phenomena requires a nanoscale probe that directly interacts with PSD. Here, we propose and demonstrate that the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond can be used as a quantum sensor for detecting the spinning nature of photons. This room temperature magnetometer can measure the local polarization of light in ultra-subwavelength volumes through photon-spin-induced virtual transitio…
Sensing with undetected photons enables the measurement of absorption and phase shifts at wavelengths different from those detected. Here, we experimentally map the balance and loss parameter space in a non-degenerate nonlinear interferometer, showing the recovery of sensitivity despite internal losses at the detection wavelength. We further explore an interaction-free operation mode with a detector-to-sample incident optical power ratio of >200. This allows changes in attowatt levels of power at 3.4 $μ$m wavelength to be detected at 1550 nm, immune to the level of thermal black-body backgroun…
Recent years have seen the development of quantum sensing concepts utilizing nonlinear interferometers based on correlated photon pairs generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). Using SPDC far from frequency degeneracy allows a 'division of labor' between the mid-infrared photon for strongest sample interaction and the correlated near-infrared photon for low-noise detection. The small number of photons provided by SPDC and the resulting inferior signal-to-noise ratio are, however, a limiting factor preventing wide applicability of the novel sensing concept. Here, we demonstra…
We analyze theoretically and experimentally cases of asymmetric detection, stimulation, and loss within a quantum nonlinear interferometer of entangled pairs. We show that the visibility of the SU(1,1) interference directly discerns between loss on the measured mode (signal) and the conjugated mode (idler). This asymmetry also affects the phase sensitivity of the interferometer, where coherent seeding is shown to mitigate losses that are suffered by the conjugated mode; therefore increasing the maximum threshold of loss that permits sub-shot-noise phase detection. Our findings can improve the …
Quantum sensing is highly attractive for accessing spectral regions in which the detection of photons is technically challenging: sample information is gained in the spectral region of interest and transferred via entanglement into another spectral range, for which highly sensitive detectors are available. This is especially beneficial for terahertz radiation, as the corresponding photon energy lies in the range of a few meV - an energy where no semiconductor detectors are available and coherent detection schemes or cryogenically cooled bolometers have to be employed. Here, we report on the fi…
Path-entangled multi-photon states allow optical phase-sensing beyond the shot-noise limit, provided that an efficient parity measurement can be implemented. Realising this experimentally is technologically demanding, as it requires coincident single-photon detection proportional to the number of photons involved, which represents a severe challenge for achieving a practical quantum advantage over classical methods. Here, we exploit advanced quantum state engineering based on superposing two photon-pair creation events to realise a new approach that bypasses this issue. In particular, optical …
The ability to completely characterize the state of a quantum system is an essential element for the emerging quantum technologies. Here, we present a compressed-sensing inspired method to ascertain any rank-deficient qudit state, which we experimentally encode in photonic orbital angular momentum. We efficiently reconstruct these qudit states from a few scans with an intensified CCD camera. Since it requires only a few intensity measurements, our technique would provide an easy and accurate way to identify quantum sources, channels, and systems.
We demonstrate how to efficiently implement extremely high-dimensional compressive imaging of a bi-photon probability distribution. Our method uses fast-Hadamard-transform Kronecker-based compressive sensing to acquire the joint space distribution. We list, in detail, the operations necessary to enable fast-transform-based matrix-vector operations in the joint space to reconstruct a 16.8 million-dimensional image in less than 10 minutes. Within a subspace of that image exists a 3.2 million-dimensional bi-photon probability distribution. In addition, we demonstrate how the marginal distribution…
Accurately establishing the state of large-scale quantum systems is an important tool in quantum information science; however, the large number of unknown parameters hinders the rapid characterisation of such states, and reconstruction procedures can become prohibitively time-consuming. Compressive sensing, a procedure for solving inverse problems by incorporating prior knowledge about the form of the solution, provides an attractive alternative to the problem of high-dimensional quantum state characterisation. Using a modified version of compressive sensing that incorporates the principles of…
Efficient devices for light harvesting and photon sensing are fundamental building blocks of basic energy science and many essential technologies. Recent efforts have turned to biomimicry to design the next generation of light-capturing devices, partially fueled by an appreciation of the fantastic efficiency of the initial stages of natural photosynthetic systems at capturing photons. In such systems extended excitonic states are thought to play a fundamental functional role, inducing cooperative coherent effects, such as superabsorption of light and supertransfer of photoexcitations. Inspired…
We consider the interaction of a magnetically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate of Rubidium atoms with the stationary microwave radiation field sustained by a coplanar waveguide resonator. This coupling allows for the measurement of the magnetic field of the resonator by means of counting the atoms that fall out of the condensate due to hyperfine transitions to non-trapped states. We determine the quantum efficiency of this detection scheme and show that weak microwave fields at the single-photon level can be sensed with an integration time on the order of a second.
Precise measurement of the angular deviation of an object is a common task in science and technology. Many methods use light for this purpose. Some of these exploit interference effects to achieve technological advantages, such as amplification effects, or simplified measurement devices. However, all of these schemes require phase stability to be useful. Here we show theoretically and experimentally that this drawback can be lifted by utilizing two-photon interference, which is known to be less sensitive to phase fluctuations. Our results show that non-classical interference can provide a path…
Frequency comb absorption spectroscopy combined with low-noise, fast homodyne measurements provide a toolbox for ultra-sensitive absorption measurements. Integrating these schemes on photonic platforms to bring them closer to practical applications is challenging. Here, we propose a scheme that can be readily adapted on a photonic platform. We show that each frequency comb tooth can independently sampled, the span of the comb can be tailored, and that our method does not require a careful alignment of the comb centre with any absorption profiles. This allows an asymmetric absorption profile to…
Phase-insensitive optical amplifiers uniformly amplify each quadrature of an input field and are of both fundamental and technological importance. We find the quantum limit on the precision of estimating the gain of a quantum-limited phase-insensitive optical amplifier using a multimode probe that may also be entangled with an ancilla system. In stark contrast to the sensing of loss parameters, the average photon number $N$ and number of input modes $M$ of the probe are found to be equivalent and interchangeable resources for optimal gain sensing. All pure-state probes whose reduced state on t…
When a photon interferes with itself while traversing a Mach-Zehnder inteferometer, the output port where it emerges is influenced by the phase difference between the interferometer arms. This allows for highly precise estimation of the path length difference (delay) but is extremely sensitive to phase noise. By contrast, a delay between the arms of the two-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer directly affects the relative indistinguishability of the photon pair, affecting the rate of recorded coincidences. This likewise allows for delay estimation; notably less precise but with the advantage …
Quantum entanglement can help to increase the precision of optical phase measurements beyond the shot noise limit (SNL) to the ultimate Heisenberg limit. However, the N-photon parity measurements required to achieve this optimal sensitivity are extremely difficult to realize with current photon detection technologies, requiring high-fidelity resolution of N+1 different photon distributions between the output ports. Recent experimental demonstrations of precision beyond the SNL have therefore used only one or two photon-number detection patterns instead of parity measurements. Here we investiga…
Single-photon creation through parametric downconversion underpins quantum technology for quantum sensing and imaging. Here we numerically study the creation of single photons in the near- and mid-infrared regime from 1.5 - 12 um in a range of novel nonlinear semiconductor and chalcopyrite materials. We identify phase-matching conditions and single out regimes in which group-velocity matching can be achieved with commercially available pump lasers. Finally, we discuss how mid-infrared single photons can be detected. Using our numerical results, we identify materials and pump lasers for up-conv…
We consider the phase sensing via weak optical coherent state at quantum limit precision. A new detection scheme for the phase estimation is proposed which is inspired by the suboptimal quantum measurement in coherent optical communication. We theoretically analyze a performance of our detection scheme, which we call the displaced-photon counting, for phase sensing in terms of the Fisher information and show that the displaced-photon counting outperforms the static homodyne and heterodyne detections in wide range of the target phase. The proof-of-principle experiment is performed with linear o…
We propose a class of path-entangled photon Fock states for robust quantum optical metrology, imaging, and sensing in the presence of loss. We model propagation loss with beam-splitters and derive a reduced density matrix formalism from which we examine how photon loss affects coherence. It is shown that particular entangled number states, which contain a special superposition of photons in both arms of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, are resilient to environmental decoherence. We demonstrate an order of magnitude greater visibility with loss, than possible with N00N states. We also show that t…
Detecting coherent phonons pose different challenges compared to coherent photons due to the much stronger interaction between phonons and matter. This is especially true for high frequency heat carrying phonons, which are intrinsic lattice vibrations experiencing many decoherence events with the environment, and are thus generally assumed to be incoherent. Two photon interference techniques, especially coherent population trapping (CPT) and electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), have led to extremely sensitive detection, spectroscopy and metrology. Here, we propose the use of two pho…
Distributed Phase Sensing with Multiphoton States in Optical Interferometry
Politecnico di Bari（巴里理工大学）；Dipartimento Interateneo di Fisica, Politecnico di Bari（巴里理工大学联合物理系）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Sezione di Bari（意大利国家核物理研究所（INFN）巴里分部）
We investigate a single atom cavity-QED system directly driven by a broadband squeezed light. We demonstrate how the squeezed radiation can be used to sense the presence of a single atom in a cavity. This happens by transferring one of the photons from the field in a state with even number of photons to the atom and thereby populating odd number Fock states. Specifically, the presence of the atom is sensed by remarkable changing in the presence of one photon and the loss of squeezing of the cavity field. A complete study of quantum fluctuations and the excitation of multiphoton transitions is …
Noise-Limited Sensitivity in Cavity Optomechanical Molecular Sensing Enabled by Quantum Zero-Point Displacement Coupling and Strong Photon-Phonon Interaction for Chiral Detection
In this review we present the potentialities and the achievements of the use of non-classical photon number correlations in twin beams (TWB) states for many applications, ranging from imaging to metrology. Photon number correlations in the quantum regime are easy to be produced and are rather robust against unavoidable experimental losses, and noise in some cases, if compared to the entanglement, where loosing one photon can completely compromise the state and its exploitable advantage. Here, we will focus on quantum enhanced protocols in which only phase-insensitive intensity measurements (ph…
Even though ideas of extracting future-related, or Faster-Than-Light (FTL) information from hyperspace using quantum entanglement have generally been refuted in the last ten years, in this paper we show that the original 'Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser Experiment', 1st performed by Yoon-Ho Kim, R. Yu, S.P. Kulik, Y.H. Shih, designed by Marlan O. Scully & Druhl in 1982-1999, still features hidden topological properties that may have been overlooked by previous analysis, and which prohibit, by principle, the extraction of future-related or real-time information from the detection of the signal pa…
