abstract

• Advances in the production of multiple-photon states with a broadband spectrum and its subsequent processing through linear optical systems demand simple rules to automate the calculation of probability amplitudes. A methodology to write down directly the probability amplitude of any broadband multi-photon process in linear optics is proved. A physically intuitive notion of multi-photon paths is derived from Wicks theorem and amplitudes are formulated as sums over paths. Every permutation of the out-state photon frequencies over the photon occupation indices that the in-state wavepacket assigns to the inports contributes a path. A simple general rule is provided to compute them. Broadband two-photon processes in the interferometers by Hong, Ou and Mandel (HOM) and by Mach and Zehnder (MZ) are considered. We provide a rigorous description of the HOM interferometer as a probe of the amount of frequency entanglement contained in some two-photon wavepackets, establishing an integral transform between the interference profile and the spectral density of frequency-entangled photon pairs. For the MZ interferometer, our method provides the exact rate of coincidence counts for a broadband two-photon process that is relevant for pairs produced with a wide two-dimensional spectral bandwidth by spontaneous parametric downconversion. © 2012 IOP Publishing Ltd.

authors

• Leija N.
• Urías Hermosillo Jesús

publication date

• 2012-01-01

published in

• Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical  Journal

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.1088/1751-8113/45/30/305303

start page

end page

volume

• 45

issue

• 30