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Guillaume S. Thekkadath

Publications and source records attributed to Guillaume S. Thekkadath.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Multiphoton interference in a single-spatial-mode quantum walk

Multiphoton interference is crucial to many photonic quantum technologies. In particular, interference forms the basis of optical quantum information processing platforms and can lead to significant computational advantages. It is therefore interesting to study the interference arising from various states of light in large interferometric networks. Here, we implement a quantum walk in a highly stable, low-loss, multiport interferometer with up to 24 ultrafast time bins. This time-bin interferometer comprises a sequence of birefringent crystals which produce pulses separated by 4.3\,ps, all along a single optical axis. Ultrafast Kerr gating in an optical fiber is employed to time-demultiplex the output from the quantum walk. We measure one-, two-, and three-photon interference arising from various input state combinations, including a heralded single-photon state, a thermal state, and an attenuated coherent state at one or more input ports. Our results demonstrate that ultrafast time bins are a promising platform to observe large-scale multiphoton interference.

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Measuring the quadrature coherence scale on a cloud quantum computer

Coherence underlies quantum phenomena, yet it is manifest in classical theories; delineating coherence's role is a fickle business. The quadrature coherence scale (QCS) was invented to remove such ambiguity, quantifying quantum features of any single-mode bosonic system without choosing a preferred orientation of phase space. The QCS is defined for any state, reducing to well-known quantities in appropriate limits, including Gaussian and pure states, and perhaps most importantly for a coherence measure, it is highly sensitive to decoherence. Until recently, it was unknown how to measure the QCS; we here report on an initial measurement of the QCS for squeezed light and thermal states of light. This is performed using Xanadu's machine Borealis, accessed through the cloud, which offers the configurable beam splitters and photon-number-resolving detectors essential for measuring the QCS. The data and theory match well, certifying the usefulness of interferometers and photon-counting devices in certifying quantumness.

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Testing multi-photon interference on a silicon chip

Multi-photon interference in large multi-port interferometers is key to linear optical quantum computing and in particular to boson sampling. Silicon photonics enables complex interferometric circuits with many components in a small footprint and has the potential to extend these experiments to larger numbers of interfering modes. However, loss has generally limited the implementation of multi-photon experiments in this platform. Here, we make use of high-efficiency grating couplers to combine bright and pure quantum light sources based on ppKTP waveguides with silicon circuits. We interfere up to 5 photons in up to 15 modes, verifying genuine multi-photon interference by comparing the results against various models including partial distinguishability between photons.

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An experimental investigation of measurement-induced disturbance and time symmetry in quantum physics

Unlike regular time evolution governed by the Schrödinger equation, standard quantum measurement appears to violate time-reversal symmetry. Measurement creates random disturbances (e.g., collapse) that prevents back-tracing the quantum state of the system. The effect of these disturbances is explicit in the results of subsequent measurements. In this way, the joint result of sequences of measurements depends on the order in time in which those measurements are performed. One might expect that if the disturbance could be eliminated this time-ordering dependence would vanish. Following a recent theoretical proposal [A. Bednorz et al 2013 New J. Phys. 15 023043], we experimentally investigate this dependence for a kind of measurement that creates an arbitrarily small disturbance, weak measurement. We perform various sequences of a set of polarization weak measurements on photons. We experimentally demonstrate that, although the weak measurements are minimally disturbing, their time-ordering affects the outcome of the measurement sequence for quantum systems.

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Spin correlations and entanglement in partially magnetised ensembles of fermions

We show that the singlet fraction $p_s$ and total magnetisation (or polarisation) $m$ can bound the minimum concurrence in an ensemble of spins. We identify $p_s > (1-m^2)/2$ as a sufficient and tight condition for bipartite entanglement. Our proof makes no assumptions about the state of the system or symmetry of the particles, and can therefore be used as a witness for spin entanglement between fermions. We discuss the implications for recent experiments in which spin correlations were observed, and the prospect to study entanglement dynamics in the demagnetisation of a cold Fermi gas.

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