分类: 光学 >> 量子光学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Quantum metrology employs quantum resources to enhance the measurement sensitivity beyond that can be achieved classically. While multi-photon entangled NOON states can in principle beat the shot-noise limit and reach the Heisenberg limit, high NOON states are difficult to prepare and fragile to photon loss which hinders it from reaching unconditional quantum metrological advantages. Here, we combine the idea of unconventional nonlinear interferometers and stimulated emission of squeezed light, previously developed for photonic quantum computer Jiuzhang, to propose and realize a new scheme that achieves a scalable, unconditional, and robust quantum metrological advantage. We observe a 5.8(1)-fold enhancement above the shot-noise limit in the Fisher information extracted per photon, without discounting for photon loss and imperfections, which outperforms ideal 5-NOON states. The Heisenberg-limited scaling, the robustness to external photon loss, and the ease-to-use of our method make it applicable in practical quantum metrology at low photon flux regime.
分类: 光学 >> 量子光学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Deep space explorations require transferring huge amounts of data quickly from very distant targets. Laser communication is a promising technology that can offer a data rate of magnitude faster than conventional microwave communication due to the fundamentally narrow divergence of light. This study demonstrated a photon-sensitive receiver prototype with over Gigabit data rate, immunity to strong background photon noise, and simultaneous tracking ability. The advantages are inherited from a joint-optimized superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) array, designed into a four-quadrant structure with each quadrant capable of resolving six photons. Installed in a free-space coupled and low-vibration cryostat, the system detection efficiency reached 72.7%, the detector efficiency was 97.5%, and the total photon counting rate was 1.6 Gcps. Additionally, communication performance was tested for pulse position modulation (PPM) format. A series of signal processing methods were introduced to maximize the performance of the forward error correction (FEC) code. Consequently, the receiver exhibits a faster data rate and better sensitivity by about twofold (1.76 photons/bit at 800 Mbps and 3.40 photons/bit at 1.2 Gbps) compared to previously reported results (3.18 photon/bit at 622 Mbps for the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration). Furthermore, communications in strong background noise and with simultaneous tracking ability were demonstrated aimed at the challenges of daylight operation and accurate tracking of dim beacon light in deep space scenarios.
分类: 光学 >> 量子光学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Light-matter interaction is exploited in spectroscopic techniques to access information about molecular, atomic or nuclear constituents of the sample of interest. While scattered light carries both amplitude and phase information of the electromagnetic field, most of the time the latter is lost in intensity measurements. However, often the phase information is paramount to reconstruct the desired information of the target, as it is well known from coherent x-ray imaging. Here we introduce a new phase retrieval algorithm which allows us to reconstruct the field phase information from two-dimensional time- and energy-resolved spectra. We apply this method to the particular case of x-ray scattering off M\"ossbauer nuclei at a synchrotron radiation source. Knowledge of the phase allows also for an excellent reconstruction of the energy spectra from experimental data, which could not be achieved with this resolution otherwise. Our approach provides an efficient novel data analysis tool which will benefit x-ray quantum optics and M\"ossbauer spectroscopy with synchrotron radiation alike.
分类: 光学 >> 量子光学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: The tantalizing promise of quantum computational speedup in solving certain problems has been strongly supported by recent experimental evidence from a high-fidelity 53-qubit superconducting processor1 and Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) with up to 76 detected photons. Analogous to the increasingly sophisticated Bell tests that continued to refute local hidden variable theories, quantum computational advantage tests are expected to provide increasingly compelling experimental evidence against the Extended Church-Turing thesis. In this direction, continued competition between upgraded quantum hardware and improved classical simulations is required. Here, we report a new GBS experiment that produces up to 113 detection events out of a 144-mode photonic circuit. We develop a new high-brightness and scalable quantum light source, exploring the idea of stimulated squeezed photons, which has simultaneously near-unity purity and efficiency. This GBS is programmable by tuning the phase of the input squeezed states. We demonstrate a new method to efficiently validate the samples by inferring from computationally friendly subsystems, which rules out hypotheses including distinguishable photons and thermal states. We show that our noisy GBS experiment passes the nonclassicality test using an inequality, and we reveal non-trivial genuine high-order correlation in the GBS samples, which are evidence of robustness against possible classical simulation schemes. The photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang 2.0, yields a Hilbert space dimension up to $10^{43}$, and a sampling rate $10^{24}$ faster than using brute-force simulation on supercomputers.
分类: 光学 >> 量子光学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Optical spectrometers are the central instruments for exploring the interaction between light and matter. The current pursuit of the field is to design a spectrometer without the need for wavelength multiplexing optics to effectively reduce the complexity and physical size of the hardware. Based on computational spectroscopic results and combining a broadband-responsive dynamic detector, we successfully demonstrate an optics-free single-detector spectrometer that maps the tunable quantum efficiency of a superconducting nanowire into an ill-conditioned matrix to build a solvable inverse mathematical equation. Such a spectrometer can realize a broadband spectral responsivity ranging from 660 to 1900 nm. The spectral resolution at the telecom is 6 nm, exceeding the energy resolving capacity of existing infrared single-photon detectors. Meanwhile, benefiting from the optics-free setup, precise time-of-flight measurements can be simultaneously achieved. We have demonstrated a spectral LiDAR with 8 spectral channels. This work provides a concise method for building multifunctional spectrometers and paves the way for applying superconducting nanowire detectors in spectroscopy.