The concept of mode locking in laser is applied to a two-photon state with frequency entanglement. Cavity enhanced parametric down conversion is found to produce exactly such a state. The mode-locked two-photon state exhibits a comblike correlation function. An unbalanced Hong-Ou-Mandel type interferometer is used to measure the correlation function. A revival of the typical interference dip is observed. We will discuss a scheme for engineering of quantum states in time domain.
The nonclassical effect of photon anti-bunching is observed in the mixed field of a narrow band twophoton source and a coherent field under certain condition. A variety of different features in photon statistics are found to be the consequence of a two-photon interference effect with dependence on the relative phase of the fields. Besides the anti-bunching effect, we find another one of the features to be also nonclassical. These features emphasize the importance of quantum entanglement.Nonclassical photon statistics such as photon antibunching is usually observed in two-level atomic system with resonant excitation, where quantum nature of the process prevents the emission of two photons at the same time. Therefore, an anti-bunched photon field will have less two-photon events than fields with random photon statistics such as a coherent field from a laser. Historically, this was the first observed nonclassical effect requiring a full quantum description of light [1]. Since then, such a nonclasical effect has been observed in the fluorescence in a variety of systems consisting of a small number of atoms, ions and molecules [2][3][4]. Recently, potential application in quantum cryptography has renewed the interest in producing anti-bunched photon source [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12].
The field of nonlinear optics has grown substantially in past decades, leading to tremendous progress in fundamental research and revolutionized applications. Traditionally, the optical nonlinearity for a light wave at frequencies beyond near-infrared is observed with very high peak intensity, as in most materials only the electronic nonlinearity dominates while ionic contribution is negligible. However, it was shown that the ionic contribution to nonlinearity can be much larger than the electronic one in microwave experiments. In the terahertz (THz) regime, phonon polariton may assist to substantially trigger the ionic nonlinearity of the crystals, so as to enhance even more the nonlinear optical susceptibility. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a giant second-order optical nonlinearity at THz frequency, orders of magnitude higher than that in the visible and microwave regimes. Different from previous work, the phonon-light coupling is achieved under a phase-matching setting, and the dynamic process of nonlinear THz generation is directly observed in a thin-film waveguide using a time-resolved imaging technique. Furthermore, a nonlinear modification to the Huang equations is proposed to explain the observed nonlinearity enhancement. This work brings about an effective approach to achieve high nonlinearity in ionic crystals, promising for applications in THz nonlinear technologies.
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