Two-photon interference between disparate sources for quantum networking

R. Mcmillan A. (1, 2) , Laurent Labonté (3) , S. Clark A. (1, 4) , Brin Bell (1) , Anthony Martin (3) , Olivier Alibart (3) , William J. Wadsworth (2) , Sébastien Tanzilli (3) , J. G. Rarity (1)

1 Centre for Communications Research
2 CPPM - Centre for Photonics and Photonic Materials [Bath]
3 LPMC - Laboratoire de physique de la matière condensée
4 CUDOS - Centre for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems

Quantum networks involve entanglement sharing between multiple users. Ideally, any two users would be able to connect regardless of the type of photon source they employ, provided they fulfill the requirements for two-photon interference. From a theoretical perspective, photons coming from different origins can interfere with a perfect visibility, provided they are made indistinguishable in all degrees of freedom. Previous experimental demonstrations of such a scenario have been limited to photon wavelengths below 900 nm, unsuitable for long distance communication, and suffered from low interference visibility. We report two-photon interference using two disparate heralded single photon sources, which involve different nonlinear effects, operating in the telecom wavelength range. The measured visibility of the two-photon interference is 80+/-4%, which paves the way to hybrid universal quantum networks.

Keywords: Quantum Optics; Nonlinear Optics; Fiber Optics and Optical Communications; Quantum Information

Domains: Quantum Physics [quant-ph]

R. Mcmillan A., Laurent Labonté, S. Clark A., Brin Bell, Anthony Martin, et al.. Two-photon interference between disparate sources for quantum networking. Scientific Reports, 2013, 3, pp.2032. ⟨10.1038/srep02032⟩. ⟨hal-00838185⟩