English

Distinguishability and "which pathway" information in multidimensional interferometric spectroscopy with a single entangled photon-pair

Quantum Physics 2021-07-13 v1

Abstract

Correlated photons inspire abundance of metrology-related platforms, which benefit from quantum (anti-) correlations and outperform their classical-light counterparts. While such demonstrations mainly focus on entanglement, the role of photon exchange-phase and degree of distinguishability have not been widely utilized in quantum-enhanced applications. Using an interferometric setup we show that even at low degree entanglement, when a two-photon wave-function is coupled to matter, it is encoded with a reliable "which pathway?" information. An interferometric exchange-phase-cycling protocol is developed, which enables phase-sensitive discrimination between microscopic interaction histories (pathways). We find that quantum-light interferometry facilitates utterly different set of time-delay variables, which are unbound by uncertainty to the inverse bandwidth of the wave-packet. We illustrate our findings on an exciton model-system, and demonstrate how to probe intraband dephasing in time-domain without temporal resolution at the detection. The exotic scaling of multiphoton coincidence with respect to the applied intensity is discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.05228,
  title  = {Distinguishability and "which pathway" information in multidimensional interferometric spectroscopy with a single entangled photon-pair},
  author = {Shahaf Asban and Shaul Mukamel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.05228},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

We theoretically introduce a scheme termed "exchange-phase-cycling". Here, we cycle the effective exchange phase of an entangled photon pair using a combination of Michelson and Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometers to separate between microscopic histories of light-matter interactions

R2 v1 2026-06-24T04:05:33.787Z