Energy-time-entangled two-photon molecular absorption

Abstract

Nonlinear spectroscopy and microscopy techniques are ubiquitous in a wide range of applications across physics and biology. However, these usually rely on high-powered pulsed laser systems. A promising alternative is to exploit entangled two-photon absorption (ETPA), which can lead to tens of orders of magnitude lower incident flux rates than in conventional two-photon absorption (TPA) schemes. However, the role of different entangled degrees of freedom in ETPA was unclear following recent experimental studies, when compared to earlier theoretical works. Here, we first demonstrate a linear dependence of the ETPA rate with the photon-pair flux, a clear signature of ETPA, and estimate the first values for the concentration-dependent ETPA cross-section for Rhodamine 6G.We then investigate the signature of energy-time entanglement and polarization dependence in the ETPA fluorescence rate and demonstrate a strong dependence of the signal on the inter-photon delay that reflects the coherence time of the entangled two-photon wave-packet.