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

TL;DR

This paper reports the experimental generation of non-diffracting single photons using SPDC pumped by a Bessel-Gauss beam, demonstrating that single photons can maintain their transverse intensity distribution over distance without additional post-processing.

Contribution

It introduces a method to produce non-diffracting heralded single photons directly from SPDC using a Bessel-Gauss pump beam, without post-generation modifications.

Findings

Single photons exhibit non-diffracting behavior over significant distances.

The non-diffracting property is directly mapped from the pump beam to the heralded photons.

The method simplifies the generation of non-diffracting single photons for quantum applications.

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.