The Measurement, Creation and Manipulation of Quantum Optical States Via Photodetection
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The measurement, creation and manipulation of quantum optical states via photodetection James G. Webb B.E. (Hons), University of Canberra, 1997. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of New South Wales Submitted 31 March 2009 Revised 13 August 2009 Declaration This thesis is an account of research undertaken in the School of Engineering and Infor- mation Technology, The University of New South Wales and Tokyo University between July 2004 and March 2009. I herebydeclare that this submission is my own workand to thebest of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledge- ment is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged. James G. Webb 13 August 2009 Acknowledgments With a journey lasting just over 5 years - where does one begin to say thankyou to those that made the voyage possible? Firstly I’d like to thank my supervisor Elanor Huntington, who is also as acutely as aware as to how long the journey took! Thankyou for your patience and guidance into the (previously) unfamiliar realms of experimental physics. I appreciated your similarly twisted humour and friendship, your concern, late night emails and repeated willingness to drop everything to help me over the endless supply of hurdles. Thankyou for all the opportunities you gave me to extend myself and my understanding as well, while showing me that physics is fun! Thankyou too to Tim Ralph - the man with a planet sized brain! I’ve yet to discover a concept that you were unable to understand or be able to explain. Combining a quick wit, limitless friendly patience and an uncanny ability to give the right answers when repeatedly put on the spot, I have really enjoyed working with you over the years. Arigato gozaimasu Furusawa-sensei - to yourself and your remarkable team at Tokyo University. The two months I spent visiting your lab will remain with me forever - I enjoyed the experience on so many personal and intellectual levels. Thankyou for taking the time to teach, translate and inspire. I will be back... Three close personal friends and mentors deserve a special mention - Greg Milford, Trevor Hobbs and Phillip Musumeci. Indeed, these three are largely responsible for my choosing to embark down the PhD. path in the first place (so its their fault!). Thankyou Greg for your guidance, mateship, dinners and beer, lifts to and fro, shared philosophy and electromagnetics brilliance. Trevor - ever since we met in first year you’ve encour- aged me to learn and I’ve learnt so much in so many areas from you - thankyou. And Phil, even from northern Queensland you’ve managed to help me stay focussed and keep me abreast of everything from computing to musical theatre. Thanks guys. To my fellow lab rat Amy Dunlop - it has been a pleasure being a colleague and friend. We worked so well as a team together, with our (nearly) orthogonal skill sets there was always something to learn from each other on nearly any subject. Thankyou for sharing v all the hours in the dark lab wearing headlamps, listening to DJ Bobo and beating cavities into submission with me. I’d also like to thank the rest of the Quantum Electronics gang - postdoc Mich`ele and my fellow postgrads - Alex and Trevor. Collaborative colleagues by day and family friends by night, you’ve each made a big difference to my life. The technical support staff in the School of E&IT have been fantastic to me over the years and I am forever grateful. I particular though, I would like to extend a personal thanks to John Davies, Phil Hestbeck and Ian Lleyton-Grant. We’ve worked with and looked out for each other for many years - here’s to having the time to continue to do so into the future! To all of my friends who I don’t see in the corridors each day - you know who you are - thanks for sticking by me and being there to offer a shoulder to lean on when I needed it. We have many years to catch up on, and I’m looking forward to spending the time with you. Thanks beyond measure to my family; Mum, Dad, Mark and Jane. For your unwa- vering flexibility, support of every kind, encouragement, willingness to absorb hours of lectures and love I am so eternally grateful. Thankyou for putting up with me at my most distracted, for goodies both big and small and looking after me - I honestly couldn’t have got to the end without you! Thankyou too to my in-laws, Trish and Trevor for tirelessly feeding us and making sure that my abandoned wife and daughter didn’t actually feel that way... ⌣¨ Speaking of which - to my wonderful wife Dannielle, beautiful daughter Sophie and our guardian angel, we did it. Yes, “we”. There is no way this journey would have been possible without your endless accommodation of the laptop on our truncated family holidays, your patience with the constantly moving finish-line and your unconditional love throughout the long hours. Thankyou for helping me balance my life and always being there to greet me with a smile when I got home, you mean the world to me. Abstract In this thesis, we demonstrate an array of photodetection theory and techniques bridg- ing the traditional discrete and continuous variable experimental domains. In quantum optics, the creation and measurement of states of light are intertwined and we present experimental architectures considering both aspects. We describe the measurement of mean photon numbers at optical sideband frequen- cies using homodyne detection. We use our technique to provide a direct comparison to photon-counting measurements and observe that our technique exhibits superior speed, dynamic range and mode selectivity compared to photon counters. Our analysis also rejects a semiclassical description of the vacuum state, with our observations supporting the quantum mechanical model. We create a new means of describing the detection “signatures” of multi-port net- works of non-photon-number discriminating detectors. Our model includes the practical effects of loss and dark counts. We use this model to analyse the performance of the loop- and balanced- time-division-multiplexed detector architectures in a projective measure- ment role. Our analysis leads us to describe a prescriptive recipe for the optimisation of each architecture. In light of contemporary technology, we conclude the balanced TDM detector is the better architecture. Our analysis is then extended to the tomographic reconstruction of an unknown op- tical state using multi-port photon-counting networks. Our new approach is success- fully applied to the reconstruction of the photon statistics of weak coherent states and demonstrates reduced error and sensitivity to experimental parameter variations than established techniques. We report the development of a source of quadrature squeezed vacuum at 1550 nm, and characterise the squeezing observed at the first 3 free spectral ranges of the down- conversion cavity. This is then used as a source of frequency-entangled photons for a projective photon subtraction operation described by our earlier theory. We propose a new hybrid time/frequency domain approach to homodyne detection and illustrate its application in characterising the prepared state. Our output state has a statistically signif- icant single photon contribution and permits future experimentation in frequency basis quantum information. vii Contents Declaration iii Acknowledgments v Abstract vii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Perspective..................................... 1 1.2 Journalpublications ............................... 4 1.3 Thesisplan..................................... 5 1.4 Summaryofresults................................ 7 2 Quantum Optics 9 2.1 Quantumtheoryfundamentals . 9 2.2 Quantumstatesoflight.............................. 18 2.3 Linearopticalcomponents. 22 2.4 Photodetectors................................... 26 3 Homodyne Measurement of the Mean Photon Number 35 3.1 Theory ....................................... 36 3.2 Experiment..................................... 38 3.3 Modellingthevacuum .............................. 44 4 Photon Number Projection 47 4.1 Generalanalysis.................................. 48 4.2 Exampledetectionarchitectures. 51 4.3 The conditional preparation of Fock statesfrom parametric down-conversion 55 4.4 Exampledesignprocedure. 61 5 Photostatistics Reconstruction via Loop Detector Signatures 67 5.1 Photonnumberreconstruction . 68 5.2 Numericalmethods................................ 69 ix x Contents 5.3 1550nmloopdetector .............................. 71 5.4 Characterisation.................................. 74 5.5 Analysisofresults................................. 77 6 Design of a 1550 nm Squeezer 83 6.1 Non-linearoptics ................................. 83 6.2 Non-linearcrystals ................................ 87 6.3 Secondharmonicgeneration. 89 6.4 Opticalparametricoscillatordesign . 91 6.5 Squeezingmeasurements .. ...... ..... ...... ..... .... 94 6.6 Locking....................................... 98 6.7 Pump/probe/LOphaseanglemeasurement . 99 7 Heralded Single Photon Sidebands