Past exam of the laser science and quantum information processing course of the University of Oxford / 2010 / 8 (DPHY 2752, DPHP 2752)

Source extract: users.physics.ox.ac.uk/~Foot/C2/pdf/C22010Q8.pdf

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The beta barium borate crystal supplies spontaneous parametric down-conversion: a weak ultraviolet pump can produce a pair of lower-frequency photons, with their frequencies and wavevectors selected by conservation of energy and phase matching. A suitably aligned and compensated source makes the two polarization alternatives coherent, giving the stated Bell state. The crystal alone does not guarantee that every collected pair has that state.

The two polarizing beam splitters route horizontal polarization and vertical polarization to different ports. Take $H$ from arm $a$ to the trigger $T$ and $V$ to arm $c$. The ordinary beam splitter in arm $b$ is a lossless, polarization-independent 50:50 splitter, with the unused input in the vacuum state. It splits probability amplitudes, rather than measuring which output a photon takes. The half-wave plate changes the relative phase of its principal polarizations by $\pi$; orient it so that a $V$ photon in $c$ becomes $(H+V)/\sqrt{2}$ in $c^{\prime }$, up to a common phase. Finally, photodetectors absorb arriving photons and supply electrical clicks. They need not resolve photon number for the ideal four-photon, fourfold-coincidence calculation: a click at every detector already requires one photon at each.

Choose the relative wave phases so that the final polarizing beam splitter sends $H_{c^{\prime }}$ to $H_2$, $V_{c^{\prime }}$ to $V_1$, $H_d$ to $H_1$ and $V_d$ to $V_2$. Such phase conventions must be used consistently: an uncompensated relative phase would give a phase-shifted GHZ state.

Use the two-pair component of polarization-entangled down-conversion to account for identical bosons in the same collected modes. Write $a_H^{†}$ for a creation operator in mode $a$ with horizontal polarization, and similarly for the other modes. For the plus Bell state, the pair-creation operator is $K^{†}=a_H^{†}{b}_V^{†}+a_V^{†}{b}_H^{†}$. The normalized four-photon state isThese are normalized Fock states. In particular, $(a_H^{†}{)}^2|0⟩=\sqrt{2}|2H_a⟩$; omitting this factor would misnormalize the four-photon input.

The first polarizing beam splitter sends $a_H^{†}$ to $T_H^{†}$ and $a_V^{†}$ to $c_V^{†}$. Only the middle term can give exactly one trigger photon and leave another photon in $c$. In the first term both $a$ photons reach $T$ and none reaches $c$; in the last there is no trigger. Thus the relevant, still unnormalized component is

For the selected paths of the half-wave plate and beam splitter, takeHere $e$ labels the output towards $D_3$. An immaterial common reflection phase has been absorbed in the mode definitions. Keeping one photon at $D_3$ leavesAt the final polarizing beam splitter, the $H_{c^{\prime }}{H}_d$ alternative yields one $H$ at each of $D_1,D_2$, while $V_{c^{\prime }}{V}_d$ yields one $V$ at each. The two opposite-polarization alternatives send both photons to the same detector and fail fourfold coincidence counting. The accepted component is thereforeAfter conditioning and normalization, the three detected output modes haveThe optical mode matching must erase any timing, frequency or other record that distinguishes the two alternatives. Otherwise the same polarization populations could describe an incoherent mixed quantum state, rather than this quantum superposition. The Bouwmeester three-photon GHZ experiment uses this principle. The photonic GHZ preparation by fourfold coincidence is a measurement in the coincidence basis: detecting all four photons projects and consumes them. A click at $T$ by itself does not herald a guaranteed freely available three-photon state.

The optical success probability of a fourfold GHZ source depends on the photon-number statistics of the assumed two-pair input. Let $q$ be the probability that arm $a$ contains one $H$ and one $V$, given two pairs. The beam splitter then puts one of the two $b$ photons into each output with probability $1/2$, and the final polarization-parity selection succeeds with probability $1/2$. With ideal photodetectors,For the normalized, fully overlapping two-pair component of polarization-entangled down-conversion used above, $q=1/3$, so the squared norm of the accepted component gives $P=1/12$. Treating the two emissions instead as independently labelled Bell pairs gives the commonly used bookkeeping estimate $q=1/2$ and $P=1/8$. This is a different pair-statistics approximation; it must not be obtained by dropping labels from an input state without renormalizing it. Genuine GHZ state coherence additionally requires erasing information about the pair of origin.

Let $P_2$ be the two-pair probability per pulse and $f$ the pulse repetition rate. The coincidence rate is $R=f{P}_{2}q/4$. With the usual order-of-magnitude estimate $P_2\simeq p^2$, the supplied $f=10^6{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$ and $p=10^{-3}$ give $f{P}_2\simeq 1{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$. The fully overlapping model gives $R\simeq 0.083{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$, about one event per twelve seconds; independent-pair bookkeeping gives $R\simeq 0.125{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$, about one per eight seconds. Thus the estimate is of order $10^{-1}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$ under these idealizations.

An exact prefactor cannot follow from the single-pair probability alone. For example, the pair-number statistics of polarization-entangled down-conversion in a single collected mode pair give $P_2\simeq 3p^2/4$ at weak gain, and hence $R\simeq f{p}^2/16=0.0625{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$ with $q=1/3$. Multiple temporal or spectral modes change those statistics. Real collection losses and detector efficiencies further reduce the rate; they are excluded by the ideal calculation.