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Integrated quantum light source is increasingly desirable in large-scale quantum information processing.~Despite recent remarkable advances, new material platform is constantly being explored for the fully on-chip integration of quantum light generation, active and passive manipulation, and detection. Here, for the first time, we demonstrate a gallium nitride (GaN) microring based quantum light generation in the telecom C-band, which has potential towards the monolithic integration of quantum light source.~In our demonstration, the GaN microring has a free spectral range of 330 GHz and a near-zero anomalous dispersion region of over 100 nm. The generation of energy-time entangled photon pair is demonstrated with a typical raw two-photon interference visibility of 95.5$\pm$6.5%, which is further configured to generate heralded single photon with a typical heralded second-order auto-correlation $g^{(2)}_{H}(0)$ of 0.045$\pm$0.001. Our results pave the way for developing chip-scale quantum photonic circuit.

This work develops extensions of Steffensen's method to provide new tools for solving the semi-blind image reverse filtering problem. Two extensions are presented: a parametric Steffensen's method for accelerating the Mann iteration, and a family of 12 Steffensen's methods for vector variables. The development is based on Brezinski inverse and geometric product vector inverse. Variants of these methods are presented with adaptive parameter setting and first-order method acceleration. Implementation details, complexity, and convergence are discussed, and the proposed methods are shown to generalize existing algorithms. A comprehensive study of 108 variants of the vector Steffensen's methods is presented in the Supplementary Material. Representative results and comparison with current state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that the vector Steffensen's methods are efficient and effective tools in reversing the effects of commonly used filters in image processing.

The coexistence of quantum and classical light in the same fiber link is extremely desired in developing quantum communication. It has been implemented for different quantum information tasks, such as classical light coexisting with polarization-entangled photons at telecom O-band, and with quantum signal based quantum key distribution (QKD). In this work, we demonstrate the coexistence of energy-time entanglement based QKD and fiber optical communication at the telecom C-band. The property of noise from the classical channel is characterized with classical light at different wavelengths. With the largest noise, i.e., the worst case, the properties of energy-time entanglement are measured at different fiber optical communication rates. By measuring the two-photon interference of energy-time entanglement, our results show that a visibility of 82.01$\pm$1.10\% is achieved with a bidirectional 20 Gbps fiber optical communication over 40 km. Furthermore, by performing the BBM92 protocol for QKD, a secret key rate of 245 bits per second could be generated with a quantum bit error rate of 8.88\% with the coexisted energy-time entanglement.~Our demonstration paves the way for developing the infrastructure for quantum networks compatible with fiber optical communication., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

Multi-wavelength quantum light sources, especially at telecom band, are extremely desired in quantum information technology. Despite recent impressive advances, such a quantum light source with high quality remains challenging. Here we demonstrate a multi-wavelength quantum light source using a silicon nitride micro-ring with a free spectral range of 200 GHz. The generation of eight pairs of correlated photons is ensured in a wavelength range of 25.6 nm. With device optimization and noise-rejecting filters, our source enables the generation of heralded single-photons - at a rate of 62 kHz with $g^{(2)}_{h}(0)=0.014\pm0.001$, and the generation of energy-time entangled photons - with a visibility of $99.39\pm 0.45\%$ in the Franson interferometer. These results, at room temperature and telecom wavelength, in a CMOS compatible platform, represent an important step towards integrated quantum light devices for the quantum networks., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures

To advance the full potential of quantum networks one should be able to distribute quantum resources over long distances at appreciable rates. As a consequence, all components in the networks need to have large multimode capacity to manipulate photonic quantum states. Towards this end, a multimode photonic quantum memory, especially one operating at telecom wavelength, remains a key challenge. Here we demonstrate a spectro-temporally multiplexed quantum memory at 1532 nm. Multimode quantum storage of telecom-band heralded single photons is realized by employing the atomic frequency comb protocol in a 10-m-long cryogenically cooled erbium doped silica fibre. The multiplexing encompasses five spectral channels - each 10 GHz wide - and in each of these up to 330 temporal modes, resulting in the simultaneous storage of 1650 modes of single photons. Our demonstrations open doors for high-rate quantum networks, which are essential for future quantum internet.

In this paper, we study the problem of reverse image filtering. An image filter denoted g(.), which is available as a black box, produces an observation b = g(x) when provided with an input x. The problem is to estimate the original input signal x from the black box filter g(.) and the observation b. We study and re-develop state-of-the-art methods from two points of view, fixed point iteration and gradient descent. We also explore the application of acceleration techniques for the two types of iterations. Through extensive experiments and comparison, we show that acceleration methods for both fixed point iteration and gradient descent help to speed up the convergence of state-of-the-art methods.

Quantum networks play an extremely important role in quantum information science, with application to quantum communication, computation, metrology and fundamental tests. One of the key challenges for implementing a quantum network is to distribute entangled flying qubits to spatially separated nodes, at which quantum interfaces or transducers map the entanglement onto stationary qubits. The stationary qubits at the separated nodes constitute quantum memories realized in matter while the flying qubits constitute quantum channels realized in photons. Dedicated efforts around the world for more than twenty years have resulted in both major theoretical and experimental progress towards entangling quantum nodes and ultimately building a global quantum network. Here, we review the development of quantum networks and the experimental progress over the past two decades leading to the current state of the art for generating entanglement of quantum nodes based on various physical systems such as single atoms, cold atomic ensembles, trapped ions, diamonds with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers, solid-state host doped with rare-earth ions, etc. Along the way we discuss the merits and compare the potential of each of these systems towards realizing a quantum network., Comment: 71 pages, 16 figures, 1 table, accepted by Laser & Photonics Reviews

In this paper, we address a new problem of reversing the effect of an image filter, which can be linear or nonlinear. The assumption is that the algorithm of the filter is unknown and the filter is available as a black box. We formulate this inverse problem as minimizing a local patch-based cost function and use total derivative to approximate the gradient which is used in gradient descent to solve the problem. We analyze factors affecting the convergence and quality of the output in the Fourier domain. We also study the application of accelerated gradient descent algorithms in three gradient-free reverse filters, including the one proposed in this paper. We present results from extensive experiments to evaluate the complexity and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art in that (1) it is at the same level of complexity as that of the fastest reverse filter, but it can reverse a larger number of filters, and (2) it can reverse the same list of filters as that of the very complex reverse filter, but its complexity is much smaller.

Smoothing and sharpening are two fundamental image processing operations. The latter is usually related to the former through the unsharp masking algorithm. In this paper, we develop a new type of filter which performs smoothing or sharpening via a tuning parameter. The development of the new filter is based on (1) a new Laplacian-based filter formulation which unifies the smoothing and sharpening operations, (2) a patch interpolation model similar to that used in the guided filter which provides edge-awareness capability, and (3) the generalized Gamma distribution which is used as the prior for parameter estimation. We have conducted detailed studies on the properties of two versions of the proposed filter (self-guidance and external guidance). We have also conducted experiments to demonstrate applications of the proposed filter. In the self-guidance case, we have developed adaptive smoothing and sharpening algorithms based on texture, depth and blurriness information extracted from an image. Applications include enhancing human face images, producing shallow depth of field effects, focus-based image enhancement, and seam carving. In the external guidance case, we have developed new algorithms for combining flash and no-flash images and for enhancing multi-spectral images using a panchromatic image., Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures

Depth information is useful in many image processing applications. However, since taking a picture is a process of projection of a 3D scene onto a 2D imaging sensor, the depth information is embedded in the image. Extracting the depth information from the image is a challenging task. A guiding principle is that the level of blurriness due to defocus is related to the distance between the object and the focal plane. Based on this principle and the widely used assumption that Gaussian blur is a good model for defocus blur, we formulate the problem of estimating the spatially varying defocus blurriness as a Gaussian blur classification problem. We solved the problem by training a deep neural network to classify image patches into one of the 20 levels of blurriness. We have created a dataset of more than 500000 image patches of size $32\times32$ which are used to train and test several well-known network models. We find that MobileNetV2 is suitable for this application due to its low memory requirement and high accuracy. The trained model is used to determine the patch blurriness which is then refined by applying an iterative weighted guided filter. The result is a defocus map that carries the information of the degree of blurriness for each pixel. We compare the proposed method with state-of-the-art techniques and we demonstrate its successful applications in adaptive image enhancement, defocus magnification, and multi-focus image fusion.

NOON state interference (NOON-SI) is a powerful tool to improve the phase sensing precision, and plays an important role in quantum measurement. In most of the previous NOON-SI experiments, the measurements were performed in time domain where the spectral information of the involved photons was integrated and lost during the measurement. In this work, we experimentally measured the joint spectral intensities (JSIs) at different positions of the interference patterns in both time and frequency domains. It was observed that the JSIs were phase-dependent and show odd (even)-number patterns at $0$ ($\pi$) phase shift; while no interference appeared in time domain measurement, the interference pattern clearly appeared in frequency domain. To our best knowledge, the latter is the first observation of the spectrally resolved NOON state interference, which provides alternative information that cannot be extracted from the time-domain measurement. To explore its potential applications, we considered the interferometric sensing with our setup. From the Fisher information-based analysis, we show that the spectrally resolved NOON-SI has a better performance at non-zero-delay position than its non-spectrally resolved counterpart. The spectrally resolved NOON-SI scheme may be useful for quantum metrology applications such as quantum phase sensing, quantum spectroscopy, and remote synchronization.

We theoretically investigate the preparation of mid-infrared (MIR) spectrally-uncorrelated biphotons from a spontaneous parametric down-conversion process using doped LN crystals, including MgO doped LN, ZnO doped LN, and In2O3 doped ZnLN with doping ratio from 0 to 7 mol%. The tilt angle of the phase-matching function and the corresponding poling period are calculated under type-II, type-I, and type-0 phase-matching conditions. We also calculate the thermal properties of the doped LN crystals and their performance in Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. It is found that the doping ratio has a substantial impact on the group-velocity-matching (GVM) wavelengths. Especially, the GVM2 wavelength of co-doped InZnLN crystal has a tunable range of 678.7 nm, which is much broader than the tunable range of less than 100 nm achieved by the conventional method of adjusting the temperature. It can be concluded that the doping ratio can be utilized as a degree of freedom to manipulate the biphoton state. The spectrally uncorrelated biphotons can be used to prepare pure single-photon source and entangled photon source, which may have promising applications for quantum-enhanced sensing, imaging, and communications at the MIR range., Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures

We theoretically study the non-equilibrium correlations and entanglement between distant semiconductor qubits in a one-dimensional coupled-mechanical-resonator chain. Each qubit is defined by a double quantum dot (DQD) and embedded in a mechanical resonator. The two qubits can be coupled, correlated and entangled through phonon transfer along the resonator chain. We calculate the non-equilibrium correlations and steady-state entanglement at different phonon-phonon coupling rates, and find a maximal steady entanglement induced by a population inversion. The results suggest that highly tunable correlations and entanglement can be generated by phonon-qubit hybrid system, which will contribute to the development of mesoscopic physics and solid-state quantum computation.

With propagating through a dispersive medium, the temporal-spectral profile of laser pulses should be inevitably modified. Although such dispersion effect has been well studied in classical optics, its effect on a single-photon wave-packet, i.e., the matter wave of a single-photon, has not yet been entirely revealed. In this paper, we investigate the effect of dispersion on indistinguishability of single-photon wave-packets through the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference. By dispersively manipulating two indistinguishable single-photon wave-packets before interfering with each other, we observe that the difference of the second-order dispersion between two optical paths of the HOM interferometer can be mapped to the interference curve, indicating that (1) with the same amount of dispersion effect in both paths, the HOM interference curve must be only determined by the intrinsic indistinguishability between the wave-packets, i.e., dispersion cancellation due to the indistinguishability between Feynman paths; (2) unbalanced dispersion effect in two paths cannot be cancelled and will broaden the interference curve thus providing a way to measure the second-order dispersion coefficient. Our results suggest a more comprehensive understanding of the single-photon wave-packet and pave ways to explore further applications of the HOM interference.

Spectrally intrinsically uncorrelated biphoton states generated from nonlinear crystals are very important but rare resources for quantum photonics and quantum information applications. Previously, such biphoton states were generated from several kinds of crystals, however, their wavelength ranges and nonlinear efficiencies were still limited for various applications. In order to explore new crystal for wider wavelength range and higher nonlinear efficiency, here we theoretically study the generation of spectrally uncorrelated biphoton states from 14 crystals in the `BBO family', including BBO, CLBO, KABO, KBBF, RBBF, CBBF, BABF, BiBO, LBO, CBO, LRB4, LCB, YCOB, and GdCOB. They satisfy three kinds of group-velocity matching condition from near-infrared to telecom wavelengths. Furthermore, heralded single photons can be generated with a purity as high as 0.98, which is achieved without any narrow filtering. The indistinguishability of photons from independent sources is examined by the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference, which results in a visibility of 98% also without any further filtering, i.e., photons from different heralded single-photon sources are highly indistinguishable. Our study may provide single-photon sources with good performance for quantum information processing at near-infrared and telecom wavelengths., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures