Tutorial: Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with Structured Photons
Abstract
The Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect, an effective two-photon interference phenomenon, is a cornerstone of quantum optics and a key tool for linear optical quantum information processing. While the HOM effect has been extensively studied both theoretically and experimentally for various photonic quantum states, particularly in the spectral domain, detailed overviews of its behaviour for structured photons -- those with complex spatial profiles -- under arbitrary spatial mode measurement schemes are still lacking. This tutorial aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the HOM effect for structured photons, including an arbitrary mode projection on quantum interference outcomes. The tutorial also provides analytical, closed-form expressions of the HOM visibility under different measurement conditions, which is a crucial contribution for its application in computational and artificial-intelligence-driven discovery of new quantum experiments exploiting the power of photons with complex spatial modes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2501.14961,
title = {Tutorial: Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with Structured Photons},
author = {Tareq Jaouni and Xuemei Gu and Mario Krenn and Alessio D'Errico and Ebrahim Karimi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.14961},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
11 pages, 4 figures. Feedback welcome!