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Experimental demonstration of conjugate-Franson interferometry

Quantum Physics 2021-09-01 v1

Abstract

Franson interferometry is a well-known quantum measurement technique for probing photon-pair frequency correlations that is often used to certify time-energy entanglement. We demonstrate the complementary technique in the time basis, called conjugate-Franson interferometry, that measures photon-pair arrival-time correlations, thus providing a valuable addition to the quantum toolbox. We obtain a conjugate-Franson interference visibility of 96±196\pm 1% without background subtraction for entangled photon pairs generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Our measured result surpasses the quantum-classical threshold by 25 standard deviations and validates the conjugate-Franson interferometer (CFI) as an alternative method for certifying time-energy entanglement. Moreover, the CFI visibility is a function of the biphoton's joint temporal intensity and is therefore sensitive to that state's spectral phase variation, something which is not the case for Franson interferometry or Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometry. We highlight the CFI's utility by measuring its visibilities for two different biphoton states, one without and the other with spectral phase variation, and observing a 21% reduction in the CFI visibility for the latter. The CFI is potentially useful for applications in areas of photonic entanglement, quantum communications, and quantum networking.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.15084,
  title  = {Experimental demonstration of conjugate-Franson interferometry},
  author = {Changchen Chen and Jeffrey H. Shapiro and Franco N. C. Wong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.15084},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:40:43.224Z