The interaction of mesoscopic interference devices with nonclassical electromagnetic fields is studied. The external quantum fields induce a phase factor on the electric charges. This phase factor, which is a generalization of the standard Aharonov-Bohm phase factor, is in the case of nonclassical electromagnetic fields a quantum mechanical operator. Its expectation value depends on the density matrix describing the nonclassical photons and determines the interference. Several examples are discussed, which show that the quantum noise of the nonclassical photons destroys slightly the electron interference fringes. An interesting application arises in the context of distant electron interference devices, irradiated with entangled photons. In this case the interfering electrons in the two devices become entangled. The same ideas are applied in the context of SQUID rings irradiated with nonclassical electromagnetic fields. It is shown that the statistics of the Cooper pairs tunneling through the Josephson junction depend on the statistics of the photons.
Mesoscopic spin ensembles coupled to a cavity offer the exciting prospect of observing complex nonclassical phenomena that pool the microscopic features from a few spins with those of macroscopic spin ensembles. Here, we demonstrate how the collective interactions in an ensemble of as many as hundred spins can be harnessed to obtain a periodic pulse train of nonclassical light. To unravel the full quantum dynamics and photon statistics, we develop a time-adaptive variational renormalization group method that accurately captures the underlying Lindbladian dynamics of the mesoscopic spin-cavity …
Interfering electrons in a mesoscopic ring are irradiated with both classical and nonclassical microwaves. The average intensity of the charges is calculated as a function of time and it is found that it depends on the nature of the irradiating electromagnetic field. For various quantum states of the microwaves, the electron autocorrelation function is calculated and it shows that the quantum noise of the external field affects the interference of the charges. Two-mode entangled microwaves are also considered and the results are compared with those of the corresponding separable state. In both…
We experimentally demonstrate the strictly nonclassical behavior in a many-atom system using a recently derived criterion [E. Kot et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 233601 (2012)] that explicitly does not make use of quantum mechanics. We thereby show that the magnetic moment distribution measured by McConnell et al. [R. McConnell et al., Nature 519, 439 (2015)] in a system with a total mass of $2.6\times 10^5$ atomic mass units is inconsistent with classical physics. Notably, the strictly nonclassical behavior affects an area in phase space $10^3$ times larger than the Planck quantum $\hbar$.
Interpretation of the nonclassical total probability formula arising in some quantum experiments is provided based on stochastic models described by means of a sequence of random vectors changing in the measurement procedures.
We present an experiment of nonclassical interference between a pure heralded single-photon state and a weak coherent state. Our experiment is the first to demonstrate that spectrally pure single photons can have high interference visibility, 89.4 \pm 0.5%, with weak coherent photons. Our scheme lays the groundwork for future experiments requiring quantum interference between photons in nonclassical states and those in coherent states.
We present a robust tool to analyze nonclassical properties of multimode twin-beam states in the mesoscopic photon-number domain. The measurements are performed by direct detection. The analysis exploits three different non-classicality criteria for detected photons exhibiting complementary behavior in the explored intensity regime. Joint signal-idler photon-number distributions and quasi-distributions of integrated intensities are determined and compared with the corresponding distributions of detected photons. Experimental conditions optimal for nonclassical properties of twin-beam states ar…
Quantum properties of light, which are crucial resources for Quantum Technologies, are quite fragile in nature and can be degraded and even concealed by the environment. We show, both theoretically and experimentally, that mesoscopic twin-beam states of light can preserve their nonclassicality even in the presence of major losses and different types of noise, thus suggesting their potential usefulness to encode information in Quantum Communication protocols. We develop a comprehensive general analytical model for a measurable nonclassicality criterion and find thresholds on noise and losses fo…
The nonclassical effect of photon anti-bunching is observed in the mixed field of a narrow band two-photon source and a coherent field under certain condition. A variety of different features in photon statistics are found to be the consequence of a two-photon interference effect with dependence on the relative phase of the fields. Besides the anti-bunching effect, we find another one of the features to be also nonclassical. These features emphasize the importance of quantum entanglement.
We theoretically generate nonclassical states from coherent state heralded by Knill-Laflamme-Milburn (KLM)-type SU(3) interference. Injecting a coherent state in signal mode and two single-photon sources in other two auxiliary modes of SU(3) interferometry, a broad class of useful nonclassical states are obtained in the output signal port after making two single-photon-counting measurements in the two output auxiliary modes. The nonclassical properties, in terms of anti-bunching effect and squeezing effect as well as the negativity of the Wigner function, are studied in detail by adjusting the…
We study first-order interference in spontaneous parametric down-conversion generated by two pump pulses that do not overlap in time. The observed modulation in the angular distribution of the signal detector counting rate can only be explained in terms of a quantum mechanical description based on biphoton states. The condition for observing interference in the signal channel is shown to depend on the parameters of the idler radiation.
A corpuscular simulation model for second-order intensity interference phenomena is discussed. It is shown that both the visibility ${\cal V}=1/2$ predicted for two-photon interference experiments with two independent sources and the visibility ${\cal V}=1$ predicted for two-photon interference experiments with a parametric down-conversion source can be explained in terms of a locally causal, modular, adaptive, corpuscular, classical (non-Hamiltonian) dynamical system. Hence, there is no need to invoke quantum theory to explain the so-called nonclassical effects in the interference of signal a…
It is shown that both the visibility ${\cal V} = 1/2$ predicted for two-photon interference experiments with two independent sources\textcolor{black}{, like the Hanbury Brown-Twiss experiment,} and the visibility ${\cal V} = 1$ predicted for two-photon interference experiments with a parametric down-conversion source\textcolor{black}{, like the Ghosh-Mandel experiment,} can be explained \textcolor{black}{by a discrete event simulation. This simulation approach reproduces the statistical distributions of wave theory not by requiring the knowledge of the solution of the wave equation of the whol…
We report measurements of two-photon interference using a cw-pumped type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion source based on a multimode perodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate waveguide. We have used the recently demonstrated technique of controlling the spatial characteristics of the down-conversion process via intermodal dispersion to generate photon pairs in fundamental transverse modes, thus ensuring their spatial indistinguishability. Good spatial overlap of photon modes within pairs has been verified using the Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer and the preparation of polarization…
We demonstrate the existence of new nonclassical correlations in the radiation of two atoms, which are coherently driven by a continuous laser source. The photon-photon-correlations of the fluorescence light show a spatial interferene pattern not present in a classical treatment. A feature of the new phenomenon is, that bunched and antibunched light is emitted in different spatial directions. The calculations are performed analytically. It is pointed out, that the correlations are induced by state reduction due to the measurement process when the detection of the photons does not distinguish b…
We analyze the double slit interference of a mesoscopic particle. We calculate the visibility of the interference pattern, introduce a characteristic temperature that defines the onset to decoherence and scrutinize the conditions that must be satisfied for an interference experiment to be possible.
The Berry phase acquired by an electromagnetic field undergoing an adiabatic and cyclic evolution in phase space is a purely quantum-mechanical effect of the field. However, this phase is usually accompanied by a dynamical contribution and cannot be manifested in any light-beam interference experiment because it is independent of the field state. We here show that such a phase can be produced using an atom coupled to a quantized field and driven by a slowly changing classical field, and it is manifested in atomic Ramsey interference oscillations. We also show how this effect may be applied to …
In this paper, we demonstrate a source of photon pairs based on four-wave-mixing in photonic crystal fibres. Careful engineering of the phase matching conditions in the fibres enables us to create photon pairs at 597 nm and 860 nm in an intrinsically factorable state showing no spectral correlations. This allows for heralding one photon in a pure state and hence renders narrow band filtering obsolete. The source is narrow band, bright and achieves an overall detection efficiency of up to 21% per photon. For the first time, a Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with unfiltered photons from separate fib…
We present controllable generation of various kinds of highly nonclassical states of light, including the single photon state and superposition states of mesoscopically distinct components. The high nonclassicality of the generated states is measured by the negativity of the Wigner function, which is largest ever observed to our knowledge. Our scheme is based on photon subtraction from a nearly pure squeezed vacuum, generated from an optical parametric oscillator with a periodically-poled KTiOPO$_4$ crystal as a nonlinear medium. This is an important step to realize basic elements of universal…
The Ginzburg-Landau theory is used to model the order parameter of a finite-size mesoscopic ring to investigate the effects of the onset of screening currents on the transport of incoming ones. The magnetic flux breaks the symmetry of currents between input and output stubs by means of an induced spatial ordering upon diamagnetic and paramagnetic supercurrents circulating in the ring. The distribution of those screening currents drives the interference of incoming/outgoing supercurrents resulting into a sinusoidal variation of resistance as a function of the magnetic flux even if the density o…
We analyze a double-slit experiment when the interfering particle is "mesoscopic" and one endeavors to obtain Welcher Weg information by shining light on it. We derive a compact expression for the visibility of the interference pattern: coherence depends on both the spatial and temporal features of the wave function during its travel to the screen. We set a bound on the temperature of the mesoscopic particle in order that its quantum mechanical coherence be maintained.
Superposition principle of wave function in multi-slit interference experiment has been widely accepted by many quantum mechanics textbooks, however the expression ${ψ_{AB}} = {ψ_A} + {ψ_B}$ does not strictly hold. The non-classical paths in Feynman path integral provide an explanation to the multi-path interference effect, and can be used to quantitatively analyse the multi-slit interference effect. In this work, we apply quantities in Bohmian mechanics to the measurement of multi-order interference by analysing the contribution of non-classical paths to Bohmian velocity in electron's multi-s…
This work studies the interference of electrons in the presence of a line of magnetic flux surrounded by a normal-conducting mesoscopic cylinder at low temperature. It is found that, while there is a supplementary phase contribution from each electron of the mesoscopic cylinder, the sum of these individual supplementary phases is equal to zero, so that the presence of a normal-conducting mesoscopic ring at low temperature does not change the Aharonov-Bohm interference pattern of the incident electron. It is shown that it is not possible to ascertain by experimental observation that the shieldi…
Using resonant interaction between atoms and the field in a high quality cavity, we show how to generate a superposition of many mesoscopic states of the field. We study the quasi-probability distributions and demonstrate the nonclassicality of the superposition in terms of the zeroes of the Q-function as well as the negativity of the Wigner function. We discuss the decoherence of the generated superposition state. We propose homodyne techniques of the type developed by Auffeves et al [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 230405 (2003)] to monitor the superposition of many mesoscopic states.
Using the theoretical model of the optical beam-splitter, the interference of the self-phase modulated ultrashort light pulse (SPM-USP) with the coherent one is investigated. It is found that, the choice of the coefficient of transmission of the beam-splitter allows one to get the spectra of quadrature fluctuations with forms of interest to us. It is shown that the choice of the geometrical phase gives one the control of the position of the ellipse of squeezing in the quadrature space XY. The extended Mandel parameter is introduced and the photon statistics is scanned at all frequencies. It is…
We develop a technique for generating multi-photon nonclassical states via interference between coherent and Fock states using quantum catalysis. By modulating the coherent field strength, the number of catalyst photons and the ratio of the beam splitter upon which they interfere, a wide range of nonclassical phenomena can be created, including squeezing of up to 1.25 dB, anti- and super-bunched photon statistics and states exhibiting over 90% fidelity to displaced coherent superposition states. We perform quantum catalysis experimentally, showing tunability into the nonclassical regime. Our p…
Electron interference in mesoscopic devices irradiated by external non-classical microwaves, is considered. In the case of one-mode microwaves, it is shown that both the average intensity and the spectral density of the interfering electrons are sensitive to the quantum noise of the microwaves. The results for various quantum states of the microwaves are compared and contrasted with the classical case. Separable and entangled two-mode microwaves are also considered and their effect on electron average intensity and autocorrelation, is discussed.
The quantum behaviour of the electromagnetic field in mesoscopic elements is intimately linked to the quantization of the charge. In order to probe nonclassical aspects of the field in those elements, it is essential that thermal noise be reduced to the quantum level, i.e. to scales where kT < hν. This is easily achieved in dilution refrigerators for frequencies of a few GHz, i.e. in the microwave domain. Several recent experiments have highlighted the link between discrete charge transport and discrete photon emission in simple mesoscopic elements such as a tunnel junction. Photocount statist…
Two mesoscopic SQUID rings which are far from each other, are considered. A source of two-mode nonclassical microwaves irradiates the two rings with correlated photons. The Josephson currents are in this case quantum mechanical operators, and their expectation values with respect to the density matrix of the microwaves, yield the experimentally observed currents. Classically correlated (separable) and quantum mechanically correlated (entangled) microwaves are considered, and their effect on the Josephson currents is quantified. Results for two different examples that involve microwaves in numb…
We observe at record-high speed the nonclassical nature of ultra-broadband bi-photons, reducing the measurement time by four orders of magnitude compared to standard techniques of Hong-Ou-Mandel interference or sum-frequency generation. We measure the quantum state of the broadband bi-photons, amplitude and phase, with a pairwise "Mach-Zehnder" quantum interferometer, where bi-photons that are generated in one nonlinear crystal are enhanced (constructive interference) or diminished (destructive interference) in another crystal, depending on the bi-photon phase. We verify the quantum nature of …
A simple model allows us to study the nonclassical behavior of slowly moving atoms interacting with a quantized field. Atom and field become entangled and their joint state can be identified as a mesoscopic "Schroedinger-cat". By introducing appropriate observables for atom and field and by analyzing correlations between them based on a Bell-type inequality we can show the corresponding nonclassical behavior.
We investigate the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) interference pattern in the electron transmission through a mesoscopic ring in which two identical non-interacting magnetic impurities are embedded. Adopting a quantum waveguide theory, we derive the exact transmission probability amplitudes and study the influence of maximally entangled states of the impurity spins on the electron transmittivity interference pattern. For suitable electron wave vectors, we show that the amplitude of AB oscillations in the absence of impurities is in fact not reduced within a wide range of the electron-impurity coupling con…
We investigate quantum correlations in microwave radiation produced by the dynamical Casimir effect in a superconducting waveguide terminated and modulated by a superconducting quantum interference device. We apply nonclassicality tests and evaluate the entanglement for the predicted field states. For realistic circuit parameters, including thermal background noise, the results indicate that the produced radiation can be strictly nonclassical and can have a measurable amount of intermode entanglement. If measured experimentally, these nonclassicalilty indicators could give further evidence of …
Interference lies at the heart of the behavior of classical and quantum light. It is thus crucial to understand the boundaries between which interference patterns can be explained by a classical electromagnetic description of light and which, on the other hand, can only be understood with a proper quantum mechanical approach. While the case of two-mode interference has received a lot of attention, the multimode case has not yet been fully explored. Here we study a general scenario of intensity interferometry: we derive a bound on the average correlations between pairs of output intensities for…
We perform a phase-space analysis of strong-field enhanced ionisation in molecules, with emphasis on quantum-interference effects. Using Wigner quasi-probability distributions and the quantum Liouville equation, we show that the momentum gates reported in a previous publication [N. Takemoto and A. Becker, Phys. Rev. A \textbf{84}, 023401 (2011)] may occur for static driving fields, and even for no external field at all. Their primary cause is an interference-induced bridging mechanism that occurs if both wells in the molecule are populated. In the phase-space regions for which quantum bridges …
An atom attached to a micrometer-scale wire that is vibrating at a frequency of 100 MHz and with displacement amplitude 1 nm experiences an acceleration magnitude 10^9 ms^-2, approaching the surface gravity of a neutron star. As one application of such extreme non-inertial forces in a mesoscopic setting, we consider a model two-path atom interferometer with one path consisting of the 100 MHz vibrating wire atom guide. The vibrating wire guide serves as a non-inertial reference frame and induces an in principle measurable phase shift in the wave function of an atom traversing the wire frame. We…
Non-Gaussian states of an optical field are important as a proposed resource in quantum information applications. While conditional preparation is a highly successful approach to preparing such states, their quality is limited by detector non-idealities such as dead time, narrow dynamic range, limited quantum efficiency and dark noise. Mesoscopic photon counters, with peak performance at higher photon number, offer many practical advantages over single-photon level conditioning detectors. Here we propose a novel approach involving displacement of the ancilla field into the regime where mesosco…
Using cumulant expansion in Gaussian approximation, the internal quantum statistics of damped soliton-like pulses in Kerr media are studied numerically, considering both narrow and finite bandwidth spectral pulse components. It is shown that the sub-Poissonian statistics can be enhanced, under certain circumstances, by absorption, which damps out some destructive interferences. Further, it is shown that both the photon-number correlation and the correlation of the photon-number variance between different pulse components can be highly nonclassical even for an absorbing fiber. Optimum frequency…
Free fall experiments are discussed by using test masses associated to quantum states not necessarily possessing a classical counterpart. The times of flight of the Galileian experiments using classical test masses are replaced in the quantum case by probability distributions which, although still not defined in an uncontroversial manner, become manifestly dependent upon the mass and the initial state. Such a dependence is also expected in non inertial frames of reference if the weak equivalence principle still holds. This last could be tested, merging recent achievements in mesoscopic physics…
We develop a nonclassicality criterion for the interference of three delayed, but otherwise identical, light fields in a three-mode Bell interferometer. We do so by comparing the prediction of quantum mechanics with those of a classical framework in which independent sources emit electric fields with random phases. In particular, we evaluate third-order correlations among output intensities as a function of the delays, and show how the presence of a correlation revival for small delays cannot be explained by the classical model of light. The observation of a revival is thus a nonclassicality s…
We analyze a quantum reservoir engineering method, originally introduced by [Sarlette et al. in Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 010402 (2011) -- arXiv 1011.5057], for the stabilization of non-classical field states in high quality cavities. We generalize the method to the protection of mesoscopic entangled field states shared by two non-degenerate field modes. The reservoir is made up of a stream of atoms undergoing successive composite interactions with the cavity, each combining resonant with non-resonant parts. We get a detailed insight into the competition between the engineered reservoir and decohe…
It is often asserted that quantum effects can be observed in coincidence detection rates or other correlations, but never in the rate of single-photon detection. We observe nonclassical interference in a singles rate, thanks to the intrinsic nonlinearity of photon counters. This is due to a dependence of the effective detection efficiency on the quantum statistics of the light beam. Such measurements of detector response to photon pairs promise to shed light on the microscopic aspects of silicon photodetectors, and on general issues of quantum measurement and decoherence.
Implementations of solid state quantum optics provide us with devices where qubits are placed at fixed positions in photonic or plasmonic one dimensional waveguides. We show that solely by controlling the position of the qubits and with the help of a coherent driving, collective spontaneous decay may be engineered to yield an entangled mesoscopic steady-state. Our scheme relies on the realization of pure superradiant Dicke models by a destructive interference that cancels dipole-dipole interactions in one-dimension.
We generate pulsed, two mode squeezed states in a single spatio-temporal mode with mean photon numbers up to 20. We directly measure photon-number-correlations between the two modes with transition edge sensors up to 80 photons per mode. This corresponds roughly to a state-dimensionality of 6400. We achieve detection efficiencies of 64% in the technologically crucial telecom regime and demonstrate the high quality of our measurements by heralded nonclassical distributions up to 50 photons per pulse and calculated correlation functions up to 40th order.
We demonstrate sub-shot-noise photon-number correlations in a (temporal) multimode mesoscopic ($\sim 10^3$ detected photons) twin-beam produced by ps-pulsed spontaneous non-degenerate parametric downconversion. We have separately detected the signal and idler distributions of photons collected in twin coherence areas and found that the variance of the photon-count difference goes below the shot-noise limit by 3.25 dB. The number of temporal modes contained in the twin-beam, as well as the size of the twin coherence areas, depends on the pump intensity. Our scheme is based on spontaneous downco…
Dirac has written "Each photon then interferes only with itself. Interference between two different photons never occurs." Indeed, a practical definition is that "classical" optics consists of phenomena due to the interference of photons only with themselves. However, photons obey Bose statistics which implies a ``nonclassical'' tendency for them to ``bunch''. For a simple example of nonclassical optical behavior, we consider two pulses of photons of a single frequency that are simultaneously incident on two sides of a lossless, 50:50 beam splitter.
We study an optomechanical system for the purpose of generating a nonclassical mechanical state when a mechanical oscillator is quadratically coupled to a single-mode cavity field driven by a squeezed optical field. The system corresponds to a regime where the optical dissipation dominates both the mechanical damping and the optomechanical coupling. We identify that multi-phonon processes emerge in the optomechanical system and show that a mechanical oscillator prepared in the ground state will evolve into an amplitude-squared squeezed vacuum state. The Wigner distribution of the steady state …
Considering the concept of "{\it nonlinear coherent states}", we will study the interference effects by introducing the {\it "superposition of two classes of nonlinear coherent states"} which are $\fracπ{2}$ out of phase. The formalism has then been applied to a few physical systems as "harmonious states", "SU(1,1) coherent states" and "the center of mass motion of trapped ion". Finally, the nonclassical properties such as sub-Poissonian statistics, quadrature squeezing, amplitude-squared squeezing and Wigner distribution function of the superposed states have been investigated, numerically. E…
We present an efficient approach, based on a number-conditioned master equation, for large-deviation analysis in mesoscopic transports. Beyond the conventional full-counting-statistics study, the large-deviation approach encodes complete information of both the typical trajectories and the rare ones, in terms of revealing a continuous change of the dynamical phase in trajectory space. The approach is illustrated with two examples: (i) transport through a single quantum dot, where we reveal the inhomogeneous distribution of trajectories in general case and find a particular scale invariance poi…
Two-photon interference of multimode two-photon pairs produced by an optical parametric oscillator has been observed for the first time with an unbalanced interferometer. The time correlation between the multimode two photons has a multi-peaked structure. This property of the multimode two-photon state induces two-photon interference depending on delay time. The nonclassicality of this interference is also discussed.
Based on heralded interference on a six-port Mach-Zehnder interferometer, we propose protocols to generate a series of multiphoton states in primary output port, by injecting a coherent state in primary input port and two Fock states in two ancillary input ports, and measuring two Fock states in two ancillary output ports. Only manipulating at the single-photon level (i.e, |0> or |1>) in all ancillary ports, we generate sixteen types (six categories) of multiphoton nonclassical states, whose state vectors are unified as superposition of a new coherent state, a single-photon added coherent stat…
