Heonoh Kim

A high‐brightness entangled photon‐pair (HBEPP) source is essential for long‐reach entanglement‐based quantum key distribution (QKD) such as in a satellite QKD system. An ultrabright source is a good candidate to overcome significant losses and to increase the sifted key rate, but the performance is critically limited due to the multi‐photon effect that raises the error rate of the system. To accurately estimate system performance, this study first investigates an analytical model for calculating the measurement probabilities of HBEPP distribution through an asymmetric loss channel. Based on this model, this study proposes the use of a fixed‐intensity HBEPP source for satellite QKD systems, assuming a polarization‐independent channel and threshold detectors for measurement. This study confirms that fixing the mean photon number at achieves a performance of compared to the ideal one‐way communication entanglement‐based satellite QKD protocol, which is effectively optimizing the HBEPP source brightness in accordance with system losses.

We experimentally realized a bright and robust polarization-entangled photon-pair source from Doppler-broadened atomic ensembles by exploiting the strong signal-idler polarization correlation. The photon pair is emitted from the cascade-type 5S_1/2–5P_3/2–5D_5/2 transition of ⁸⁷Rb. Without using an interferometric configuration, we robustly produce all four Bell states by applying the intrinsic polarization correlation achieved in a cascade-type atomic system. The coincidence count rate of the polarization-entangled photon pairs is measured as 10.0(1) kHz under a weak pump power of 20 μW. Our scheme enables the generation of a high rate of polarization-entangled photon pairs with a high fidelity of 0.933(2). We believe that our approach to realize bright and stable polarization-entangled photon-pair sources can contribute to the construction of practical scalable quantum networks based on atom–photon interactions.

The observation of the Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM)-type two-photon interference (TPI) has played an important role in the development of photonic quantum technologies. The time-resolved coincidence-detection technique has been effectively used to identify and characterize the TPI phenomena of long-coherence optical fields. Here, we report on the experimental demonstration of the TPI of two phase-randomized weak coherent pulses with time-resolved coincidence detection. The mutual coherence time between the two weak coherent lights is determined by applying a frequency noise to one of the two interfering lights. We analyze the HOM-type TPI fringe visibility according to the ratio of the coherence time to the pulse duration.

Entanglement swapping forms a key concept in the realization of scalable quantum networks and large-scale quantum communication. For the practical implementation of entanglement swapping, completely autonomous entanglement sources and a joint Bell-state measurement (BSM) between two independent photons are essential. Here, we experimentally demonstrate entanglement swapping between two independent polarization-entangled photon-pair sources obtained via spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in a Doppler-broadened atomic ensemble of 87 R b atoms. From the joint BSM, we estimate the S parameter in the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt (CHSH) form of Bell’s inequality and confirm the violation of the Bell–CHSH inequality by S = 2.32 ± 0.07 with 4.5 standard deviations. We believe that this work is an important step toward realizing practical scalable quantum networks.

The distinguishing of the multiphoton quantum interference effect from the classical one forms one of the most important issues in modern quantum mechanics and experimental quantum optics. For a long time, the two-photon interference (TPI) of correlated photons has been recognized as a pure quantum effect that cannot be simulated with classical lights. In the meantime, experiments have been carried out to investigate the classical analogues of the TPI. In this study, we conduct TPI experiments with uncorrelated photons with different center frequencies from a luminescent light source, and we compare our results with the previous ones of correlated photons. The observed TPI fringe can be expressed in the form of three phase terms related to the individual single-photon and two-photon states, and the fringe pattern is strongly affected by the two single-photon-interference fringes and also by their visibilities. With the exception of essential differences such as valid and accidental coincidence events within a given resolving time and the two-photon spectral bandwidth, the interference phenomenon itself exhibits the same features for both correlated and uncorrelated photons in the single-photon counting regime.

We propose disturbance-free measurement (DFM) using a ‘weak-value’ scheme, in which a weakly measured quantum system is post-selected (to the initial state) to confirm that there is no disturbance. The probability of obtaining the non-disturbed state is asymptotically close to unity. We theoretically show that outcomes of the DFM for a two-qubit state satisfy the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality. We experimentally demonstrate the test for a typical (maximally entangled) two-qubit state based on a linear optical system. In experiments, polarization-entangled photon-pairs generated by the spontaneous parametric down-conversion process are measured by instruments such as strength-variable polarization-measurement apparatuses and a fiber-based Bell-state analyzer.

We report two-photon interference experiments performed with correlated photon pairs generated via spontaneous four-wave mixing in a Doppler-broadened atomic ensemble involving the 5S_1/2-5P_3/2-5D_5/2 transition of ⁸⁷Rb atoms. When two photons with different wavelengths are incident on a polarization-based Michelson interferometer, two kinds of two-photon superposition states, the frequency-entangled state and dichromatic path-entangled state depending on whether the two photons are in different paths or in the same path, are probabilistically generated within the interferometer arms. Hong-Ou-Mandel-type interference fringes resulting from the frequency-entangled state are observed over the range of the single-photon coherence length, following introduction of a coarse path-length difference between the two interferometer arms and employing phase randomization. When the interferometer is highly phase-sensitive without phase randomization, a phase super-resolved fringe arising from the dichromatic path-entangled state is observed, both with and without the accompanying one-photon interference fringes.