Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between two independent all fiber photon sources

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between two independent all-fiber photon sources with high visibility, explores theoretical conditions for high purity photon pairs, and shows the potential for scalable quantum information systems using fiber-based platforms.

Contribution

It reports the first interference between independent all-fiber photon sources over dense wavelength channels and provides a theoretical framework for optimizing photon pair purity.

Findings

Interference visibility of 53.2% without background subtraction

Visibility increases to 82.9% with background subtraction

Maximum coincidence-to-background ratio of 131 achieved by cooling fiber

Abstract

Guided-wave platforms such as fiber and silicon-on-insulator waveguide show great advances over traditional free space implementations in quantum information technology for significant advantages of low transmission loss, low cost, integrability and compatible with mature fiber communication systems. Interference between independent photon sources is the key to realize complex quantum systems for more sophisticated applications such as multi-photon entanglement generation and quantum teleportation. In this work, we report Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between two independent all fiber photon pair sources over two 100GHz dense wave division multiplexing channels, the visibility reaches 53.2(8.4)% (82.9(5.3)%) without (with) back ground counts subtracted. In addition, we give a general theoretical description of the purity of the photon pair generation in dispersion shifted fiber and obtain the optimized condition for high purity photon pair generation. We also obtain a maximum coincidence to back ground ratio of 131 by cooling the fiber in liquid nitrogen. Our study shows great promising of integrated optical elements for future scalable quantum information promising.