Interferometric signature of different spectral symmetries of biphoton states

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the influence of the symmetry of the biphoton wave function on the coincidence measurement of the generalized Mach-Zehnder (MZ) interferometer, where there are a temporal and frequency shift operations between the two beam splitters. We show that the generalized MZ interferometer allows the measurement of the short-time Fourier transform of the function modeling the energy conservation of a spontaneous parametric down-conversion process if the full biphoton state is symmetric, and of the symmetric characteristic distribution of the phase-matching function if the state is antisymmetric. Thus, this technique is phase sensitive to the spectral distribution of the photon pairs. Finally, we investigate in detail the signature of a pair of anyons whose peculiar statistics can be simulated by engineering the spectrum of photon pairs.