Overcoming non-Markovian dephasing in single photon sources through post-selection

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-Markovian dephasing affects single-photon sources and demonstrates that temporal post-selection can improve interference visibility, offering a method to mitigate environmental effects in quantum photonics.

Contribution

It introduces a method to enhance photon interference visibility by using temporal post-selection in the presence of non-Markovian dephasing.

Findings

Visibility loss depends on photon detection timing

Temporal post-selection improves effective visibility

Time-resolved interference probes emitter-environment interactions

Abstract

We study the effects of realistic dephasing environments on a pair of solid-state single-photon sources in the context of the Hong-Ou-Mandel dip. By means of solutions for the Markovian or exact non-Markovian dephasing dynamics of the sources, we show that the resulting loss of visibility depends crucially on the timing of photon detection events. Our results demonstrate that the effective visibility can be improved via temporal post-selection, and also that time-resolved interference can be a useful probe of the interaction between the emitter and its host environment.