Spectrally resolved two-photon interference in a modified Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates spectrally resolved two-photon interference in a modified Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer, revealing complex spectral modulations and potential for high-dimensional frequency entanglement characterization.

Contribution

It introduces a frequency-domain analysis of the modified HOM interferometer, showing spectral modulations in both sum and difference frequencies, unlike previous single-direction modulations.

Findings

Spectrally resolved interference with high visibility was achieved.

Modulations occur along both frequency sum and difference directions.

Potential application in high-dimensional frequency entanglement generation.

Abstract

A modified Hong--Ou--Mandel (HOM) interference reveals that the two-photon interference phenomenon can be explained only by the concept of a two-photon wave packet rather than a single-photon one. However, the temporal interferogram in the modified HOM interferometer becomes flat in some cases so that no useful information can be extracted from time-domain measurement. Here, we theoretically explore such temporal interferogram from the frequency domain and obtain the spectrally resolved interference with high visibility. The result represents a modulation of the joint spectral intensity along both the frequency sum and the frequency difference directions. This is quite different from the cases of the spectrally resolved HOM interference and N00N state interference where the modulations happened only in one direction. Moreover, we have shown that such modulations have a potential application in the generation and characterization of high-dimensional frequency entanglement.