Spontaneous four-wave mixing in liquid-core fibers: Towards fibered Raman-free correlated photon sources

TL;DR

This paper reports the first experimental generation of correlated photon pairs in liquid-core fibers, significantly reducing Raman noise and enhancing the potential for high-quality quantum communication sources.

Contribution

It demonstrates, for the first time, correlated photon pair generation in liquid-core fibers with reduced Raman noise, improving source quality for quantum applications.

Findings

Coincident-to-accidental ratio of 63

Pair generation efficiency of 10^{-4} per pump pulse

Reduced Raman noise compared to silica-core fibers

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, the generation of correlated photon pairs in a liquid-core photonic crystal fiber. Moreover, we show that, thanks to the specific Raman properties of liquids, the Raman noise (which is the main limitation of the performance of silica-core fiber-based correlated photon pair sources) is highly reduced. With a demonstrated coincident-to-accidental ratio equal to 63 and a pair generation efficiency of about 10$^{-4}$ per pump pulse, this work opens the way for the development of high quality correlated photon pair sources for quantum communications.