Erlangen 2022 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 4: Quantum Information (Concepts and Methods) I

Q 4.2: Talk

Monday, March 14, 2022, 14:15–14:30, Q-H12

Distinguishability and mixedness in multiphoton interference — •Shreya Kumar², Alex E Jones¹, Simone D’Aurelio², Matthias Bayerbach², Adrian Menssen³, and Stefanie Barz² — ¹QET Labs, H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory and Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1FD, UK — ²Institute for Functional Matter and Quantum Technologies & IQST, University of Stuttgart, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany — ³Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

Quantum interference of photons is central to many applications in quantum technologies such as generating entangled states, quantum metrology, quantum imaging and photonic quantum computing. One of the fundamental prerequisites for these applications is that the photons are indistinguishable and have high purity. The visibility of the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference dip is usually used to deduce the nature of the photons. In case of two photons, this visibility is reduced by distinguishability, and by mixedness in the same way. However, here, we show that that when scaling up to three photons, despite having similar HOM interference visibilities, one can differentiate between distinguishability and mixedness of the photons by observing the count statistics after interference at a tritter. This shows that the visibility alone is inadequate to discriminate between distinguishability and mixedness of the photons and that it becomes important to characterize photon state purity, in order to study interference effects at larger scales.