Analysis of Quantum Linear Systems' Response to Multi-photon States

The purpose of this paper is to present a mathematical framework for analyzing the response of quantum linear systems driven by multi-photon states. Both the factorizable (namely, no correlation among the photons in the channel) and unfactorizable multi-photon states are treated. Pulse information of multi-photon input state is encoded in terms of tensor, and response of quantum linear systems to multi-photon input states is characterized by tensor operations. Analytic forms of output correlation functions and output states are derived. The proposed framework is applicable no matter whether the underlying quantum dynamic system is passive or active. The results presented here generalize those in the single-photon setting studied in (Milburn, 2008) and (Zhang and James, 2013}). Moreover, interesting multi-photon interference phenomena studied in (Sanaka, Resch, and Zeilinger, 2006), (Ou, 2007), and (Bartley, et al., 2012) can be reproduced in the proposed framework