Abstract
Quantum theory is the foundation of modern physics. Some of its basic principles, such as Born's rule, however, are based on postulates which require experimental testing. Any deviation from Born's rule would result in higher-order interference and can thus be tested in an experiment. Here, we report on such a test with a quantum light source based on a color center in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) coupled to a microcavity. Our room temperature photon source features a narrow linewidth, high efficiency, high purity, and on-demand single-photon generation. With the single-photon source we can increase the interferometric sensitivity of our three-path interferometer compared to conventional laser-based light sources by fully suppressing the detector nonlinearity. We thereby obtain a tight bound on the third-order interference term of $3.96(523)\times 10^{-4}$. We also measure an interference visibility of 98.58% for our single-photons emitted from hBN at room temperature, which provides a promising route for using the hBN platform as light source for phase-encoding schemes in quantum key distribution.
Highlights
Low-dimensional materials and nanostructures have gained significant attention in recent years due to the rich physics and unique properties they offer [1,2,3]
In this paper we use a quantum light source based on a defect center in 2D hexagonal boron nitride coupled to a microcavity [31] to test for higher-order interference
This is a direct consequence of the linearity of the underlying Hilbert space in quantum mechanics and the square relation of Born’s rule
Summary
Low-dimensional materials and nanostructures have gained significant attention in recent years due to the rich physics and unique properties they offer [1,2,3]. Of particular interest are two-dimensional (2D) materials [4,5], which can form topological insulators [6] or Dirac semimetals [7] and can exhibit properties like super-transport [8], strongly bound excitons at room temperature [9], or superconductivity [10] This results in a broad variety of potential applications, including atomically thin electronics [11], sensing [12,13], space instrumentation [14], and photonics [15]. In this paper we use a quantum light source based on a defect center in 2D hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) coupled to a microcavity [31] to test for higher-order interference The resonator improves both the spectral and photon purity, as (b) well as ensures a high collection efficiency of the single photons. We determine the intrinsic interferometer visibility of our photon source
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