Single Spatio-Temporal Mode Bright Twin-Beam Source Across the Near- and Mid-Infrared

TL;DR

This paper presents a tunable, ultrafast twin-beam quantum light source spanning near- and mid-infrared wavelengths, suitable for advanced sensing and quantum metrology applications.

Contribution

It introduces a bright, entangled twin-beam source with controllable multimode properties generated in lithium niobate, enabling new capabilities in mid-infrared quantum technologies.

Findings

Schmidt number maintained near 1 over brightness range

Transition from single- to multi-mode controlled by pump dispersion

High entanglement resource allocation to occupational degrees of freedom

Abstract

We introduce an ultrafast, bright, entangled twin-beam source generated by type-0 parametric down-conversion in periodically-poled lithium niobate at MHz repetition rate, with continuously tunable Schmidt number $K$ set by the pump pulse duration. Photon-number statistics characterization via $g^{(2)}(0)$ and singular-value decomposition of the signal spectral density matrix yield $K\simeq1.05$ and $K\simeq1.03$, respectively, maintained over multiple orders of magnitude in brightness. Group-delay dispersion of the pump drives a continuous transition from single-mode operation to a controlled multimode regime, consistent with the temporal gain window departing from the inverse phase-matching bandwidth. Strong non-degeneracy of the source (signal at 1.37 um, idler at 4.0 um, $\sim 100$ fs duration) decouples a mid-infrared interaction wavelength, which overlaps with molecular vibrational resonances, from a near-infrared detection band, establishing a practical platform for quantum-enhanced metrology, nonlinear interferometry, and mid-infrared spectroscopic sensing. We show that in the bright few-mode limit, the total entanglement resource is clearly separated between modal and occupational degrees of freedom, and that our source allocates up to 95-97% of that resource to the occupational sector.