Almost indistinguishable single photons via multiplexing cascaded biphotons with cavity modulation and phase compensation

Abstract

The cascade-emitted biphotons generated from alkali metal atomic ensembles are an excellent entanglement resource which enables long-distance quantum communication. The communication of quantum information between distant locations can be realized by utilizing the low-loss telecom bandwidth in the upper transition of the cascaded photons in a fiber-based quantum network. Meanwhile, the infrared photon from the lower transition of this highly directional and frequency-correlated biphoton can be created using the four-wave mixing process and can be stored locally as a collective spin wave. Here, we theoretically investigate the frequency entanglement of this biphoton and propose two approaches to remove the two photons' mutual correlations in frequency spaces. The first approach applies an optical cavity which modulates the biphoton spectrum into a more symmetric and narrow spectral function by multiplexing multiple atomic ensembles with phase compensation. The purity of the single photons reaches up to 0.999, and the entanglement entropy $S$ of the biphoton is reduced to 0.006, which is 200 times smaller than the one without multiplexing. The other approach employs a symmetric pumping of the laser fields in two atomic ensembles, which leads to a moderate reduction of $S\ensuremath{\sim}0.3$ when nondiscrimination detection devices are used for both photons. An extremely low frequency entanglement implies an almost indistinguishable single-photon source, which offers a potential resource for photonic quantum emulation and computation.