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Electro-Optical Sampling of Single-Cycle THz Fields with Single-Photon Detectors

Quantum Physics 2022-12-13 v2 Optics

Abstract

Electro-optical sampling of Terahertz fields with ultrashort pulsed probes is a well-established approach for directly measuring the electric field of THz radiation. This technique usually relies on balanced detection to record the optical phase shift brought by THz-induced birefringence. The sensitivity of electro-optical sampling is, therefore, limited by the shot noise of the probe pulse, and improvements could be achieved using quantum metrology approaches using, e.g., NOON states for Heisenberg-limited phase estimation. We report on our experiments on THz electro-optical sampling using single-photon detectors and a weak squeezed vacuum field as the optical probe. Our approach achieves field sensitivity limited by the probe state statistical properties using phase-locked single-photon detectors and paves the way for further studies targeting quantum-enhanced THz sensing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2208.02103,
  title  = {Electro-Optical Sampling of Single-Cycle THz Fields with Single-Photon Detectors},
  author = {Taylor Shields and Adetunmise C. Dada and Lennart Hirsch and Seungjin Yoon and Jonathan M. R. Weaver and Daniele Faccio and Lucia Caspani and Marco Peccianti and Matteo Clerici},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.02103},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

11 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:26:59.622Z