On the Purity and Indistinguishability of Down-Converted Photons

Abstract

Photons generated by spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) are one of the most useful resources in quantum information science. Two of their most important characteristics are the purity and the indistinguishability, which determine just how useful they are as a resource. We show how these characteristics can both be accessed through Hong, Ou and Mandel (HOM) type interferences using a single pair source. We also provide simple and intuitive analytical formulas to extract their values from the depth of the resulting interference patterns. The validity of these expressions is demonstrated by a comparison with experimental results and numerical simulations. These results provide an essential tool for both engineering SPDC sources and characterizing the quantum states that they emit, which will play an increasingly important role in developing complex quantum photonic experiments.

arXiv comment11 pages, 5 figures, submitted to the Journal of Physics B

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• Optimization of periodic single-photon sources
• Wave Function Engineering for Spectrally-Uncorrelated Biphotons in the Telecommunication Band based on a Machine-Learning Framework
• Generation of tunable wavelength coherent states and heralded single photons for quantum optics applications
• Correlation control for pure and efficiently generated heralded single photons
• Optimal filtering and generation of entangled photons for quantum applications in the presence of noise
• Spectral mapping of polarization-correlated photon-pair sources using quantum-classical correspondence