Observation of non-diffracting behavior at the single-photon level

Abstract

We demonstrate the generation of non-diffracting heralded single photons, i.e. which are characterized by a single-photon transverse intensity distribution which remains essentially unchanged over a significant propagation distance. For this purpose we have relied on the process of spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC) for the generation of signal and idler photon pairs, where our SPDC crystal is pumped by a Bessel-Gauss (BG) beam. Our experiment shows that the well-understood non-diffracting behavior of a BG beam may be directly mapped to the signal-mode, single photons heralded by the detection of a single idler photon. In our experiment, the heralded single photon is thus arranged to be non-diffracting without the need for projecting its single-photon transverse amplitude, post-generation, in any manner.

8 pages, 4 figures; in v2 reference 16 has been updated

References in corpus (1)

• Shaping the waveform of entangled photons

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• All-optical mode conversion via spatially-multimode four-wave mixing
• Direct transfer of pump amplitude to parametric down-converted photons
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• Spontaneous parametric down conversion in chirped, aperiodically-poled crystals
• Size invariant twisted optical modes for efficient generation of higher dimensional quantum states