Permutational symmetries for coincidence rates in multi-mode multi-photonic interferometry

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to calculate photon coincidence rates in multi-photon interferometry by leveraging permutational symmetries and representation theory, providing a deeper understanding of multi-photon interference patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using symmetric group representation theory to express coincidence rates in terms of immanants, generalizing previous results for arbitrary photon numbers and interferometer sizes.

Findings

Coincidence rates are expressed via immanants with permutational symmetry.

The approach applies to any number of photons and interferometer configurations.

Provides qualitative insights into multi-photon interference landscapes.

Abstract

We obtain coincidence rates for passive optical interferometry by exploiting the permutational symmetries of partially distinguishable input photons, and our approach elucidates qualitative features of multi-photon coincidence landscapes. We treat the interferometer input as a product state of any number of photons in each input mode with photons distinguished by their arrival time. Detectors at the output of the interferometer count photons from each output mode over a long integration time. We generalize and prove the claim of Tillmann et al. [Phys. Rev. X 5 041015 (2015)] that coincidence rates can be elegantly expressed in terms of immanants. Immanants are functions of matrices that exhibit permutational symmetries and the immanants appearing in our coincidence-rate expressions share permutational symmetries with the input state. Our results are obtained by employing representation theory of the symmetric group to analyze systems of arbitrary number of photons in arbitrarily sized interferometers.