Towards quantum frequency combs: boosting the generation of highly nonclassical light states by cavity-enhanced parametric down-conversion at high repetition rates

Abstract

We demonstrate the generation of multi-photon quantum states of light by cavity-enhanced parametric down-conversion in the high-repetition-rate pulsed regime. An external enhancement cavity resonant with the spectral comb of modes of a mode-locked pump laser provides a coherent build-up of the pump intensity and greatly enhances the parametric gain without sacrificing its high repetition rate and comb structure. We probe the parametric gain enhancement by the conditional generation and tomographic analysis of two-photon Fock states. Besides its potential impact to efficiently generate highly-nonclassical or entangled multi-photon states in many existing experimental setups, this scheme opens new and exciting perspectives towards the combination of quantum and comb technologies for enhanced measurements and advanced quantum computation protocols.

5 pages 3 figures; updated with major additions, added references, and changed title. Accepted for publication in Physical Review A

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• Deterministic Generation of Photon Pairs within the Bad Cavity Limit
• On the scalability of parametric down-conversion for generating higher-order Fock states
• Multimode Fock states with large photon number: effective descriptions and applications in quantum metrology
• Photon-by-photon quantum light state engineering
• Generating non-Gaussian states using collisions between Rydberg polaritons
• High production rate of single-photon and two-photon Fock states for quantum state engineering
• Controlling the quantum state of a single photon emitted from a single polariton
• Experimental quantum state engineering with time-separated heraldings from a continuous-wave light source: a temporal-mode analysis
• The stellar decomposition of Gaussian quantum states
• Nondegenerate parametric down conversion in coherently prepared two-level atomic gas