Shaping of Entangled Photons

  • Primary Contact: Ogaga D. Odele (oodele@purdue.edu), Poolad Imany (pimany@purdue.edu)
  • Advisor: Andrew M. Weiner (amw@purdue.edu)
  • Additional Contact: Dr. Dan Leaird (leaird@purdue.edu), Jose A. Jaramillo-Villegas (jjv@purdue.edu)

Fourier-transform pulse shaping is a long-standing technique for manipulating ultrashort light pulses, which by the uncertainty principle are broadband in nature. In 2004, the Silberberg group showed the first application of pulse shaping at the single-photon level. As a result of our expertise in femtosecond pulse shaping, we have recently dedicated some of our efforts to studying pulse shaping of broadband entangled photons (“biphotons”)--generated from spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). Some of our contributions to this field include the demonstration of nonlocal dispersion cancellation for arbitrary orders of spectral phase, encoding and decoding of entangled photons, generation of biphoton correlation trains, the first verification of the temporal Talbot effect for entangled photons. These experiments on shaping biphoton correlations could lead to the development of quantum communication protocols that rely on preexisting classical pulse shaping technologies.

In addition to our work on biphoton pulse shaping, we are also investigating shaping of entangled photons through control of the SPDC pump. In this regard, we have developed a novel scheme for controlling the relative delay between an entangled photon pair through pump frequency tuning.

Lastly, we are exploring electro-optic modulation of these biphoton states. In a recent paper, we discuss how we employed intensity modulation to obtain a resolution improvement in temporal correlation measurements using slow single photon detectors.

Relevant Publications:


J. M. Lukens, O. D. Odele, D. E. Leaird, and A. M. Weiner, “Electro-optic modulation for high-speed characterization of entangled photon pairs,” Optics Letters 40, 5331-5334 (2015)

O. D. Odele, J. M. Lukens, J. A. Jaramillo-Villegas, C. Langrock, M. M. Fejer, D. E. Leaird, and A. M. Weiner, “Tunable delay control of biphoton correlations based on dispersion cancellation,” Opt. Express 23, 21857-21866 (2015)

J. M. Lukens, O. Odele, C. Langrock, M. M. Fejer, D. E. Leaird, and A. M. Weiner, “Generation of biphoton correlation trains through spectral filtering,” Opt. Express 22, 9585-9596 (2014)

J. M. Lukens, A. Dezfooliyan, C. Langrock. M. M. Fejer, D. E. Leaird, and A. M. Weiner, “Orthogonal Spectral Coding of Entangled Photons,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 133602 (2014)