Experimental quantum state engineering with time-separated heraldings from a continuous-wave light source: a temporal-mode analysis

TL;DR

This paper experimentally explores quantum state engineering using continuous-wave light sources, focusing on how the temporal separation of heralding detections affects the generation of two-photon states and their temporal modes.

Contribution

It demonstrates the generation of two-photon states with tunable delay between heraldings, highlighting the importance of temporal modes in continuous-wave quantum state engineering.

Findings

Two-photon states with tunable heralding delays were successfully generated.

Temporal multimode features significantly influence conditional state generation.

The work extends understanding of quantum state control in continuous-wave systems.

Abstract

Conditional preparation is a well-established technique for quantum state engineering of light. A general trend is to increase the number of heralding detection events in such realization to reach larger photon-number states or their arbitrary superpositions. In contrast to pulsed implementations, where detections only occur within the pulse window, for continuous-wave light the temporal separation of the conditioning detections is an additional degree of freedom and a critical parameter. Based on the theoretical study by A.E.B. Nielsen and K. Molmer and on a continuous-wave two-mode squeezed vacuum from a nondegenerate optical parametric oscillator, we experimentally investigate the generation of two-photon state with tunable delay between the heralding events. The present work illustrates the temporal multimode features in play for conditional state generation based on continuous-wave light sources.