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Interface between picosecond and nanosecond quantum light pulses

Nature Photonics volume 17, pages 761–766 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Light is a key information carrier, enabling worldwide, high-speed data transmission through a telecommunication fibre network. This information-carrying capacity can be extended to transmitting quantum information (QI) by encoding it in single photons—flying qubits. However, the various QI-processing platforms operate at vastly different timescales. QI-processing units in atomic media, operating within nanosecond to microsecond timescales, and high-speed quantum communication, at picosecond timescales, cannot be linked efficiently because of the orders-of-magnitude mismatch in the timescales or, correspondingly, spectral linewidths. Here we develop a large-aperture time lens using wide-bandwidth electro-optic phase modulation to bridge this gap. We demonstrate coherent, deterministic spectral bandwidth compression of quantum light pulses by more than two orders of magnitude with high efficiency. This will facilitate large-scale hybrid QI-processing by linking the ultrafast and quasi-continuous-wave experimental platforms, which until now, to a large extent, have been developing independently.

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Fig. 1: Conceptual scheme of large-scale spectral bandwidth conversion.
Fig. 2: Experimental set-up and Fresnel waveforms.
Fig. 3: Spectral compression of coherent laser pulses.
Fig. 4: Fresnel time-lens aperture.
Fig. 5: Spectral manipulation of single-photon wavepackets.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. O. C. Davis, M. Jachura, C. Radzewicz, B. J. Smith, N. Treps and A. Widomski for insightful comments and discussions. We thank Keysight and AM Technologies for equipment loans. This work was funded in part by the First TEAM (project no. POIR.04.04.00-00-5E00/18; M.K., F.S. and M.M.) and HOMING (project no. POIR.04.04.00-00-1E2B/16; M.K. and A.G.) programmes of the Foundation for Polish Science, co-financed by the European Union under the European Regional Development, and in part by the National Science Centre of Poland QuantERA project QuICHE (project no. 2019/32/Z/ST2/00018; M.K. and A.G.) and Preludium (project no. 2019/35/N/ST2/04434; F.S.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, Warszawa, Poland

    Filip Sośnicki, Michał Mikołajczyk, Ali Golestani & Michał Karpiński

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  1. Filip Sośnicki
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Contributions

M.K. conceived and supervised the project. F.S. designed and performed the experiment with a contribution from M.M., who built the photon-pair source and the tunable spectral filter. A.G. contributed to the early stages of the experiment. F.S. and M.K. wrote the manuscript with input from all the authors. F.S. prepared the figures.

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Correspondence to Filip Sośnicki or Michał Karpiński.

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Nature Photonics thanks Sunil Mittal and John Donohue for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Sections S1-S3 and Figs. S1-S2.

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Sośnicki, F., Mikołajczyk, M., Golestani, A. et al. Interface between picosecond and nanosecond quantum light pulses. Nat. Photon. 17, 761–766 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01214-z

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