Wavepacket interference of two photons through a beam splitter: from temporal entanglement to wavepacket shaping

Quantum interferences based on beam splitting are widely used for entanglement. However, the quantitative measurement of the entanglement in terms of temporal modes and wavepacket shaping facilitated by this entanglement remain unexplored. Here we analytically study the interference of two photons with different temporal shapes through a beam splitter (BS), then propose its application in temporal entanglement and shaping of photons. The temporal entanglement described by Von Neumann entropy is determined by the splitting ratio of BS and temporal indistinguishability of input photons. We found that maximum mode entanglement can be achieved with a 50/50 BS configuration, enabling the generation of a Bell state encoded in temporal modes, independent of the exact form of the input photons. Then, detecting one of the entangled photons at a specific time enables the probabilistic shaping of the other photon. This process can shape the exponentially decaying (ED) wavepacket into the ED sine shapes, which can be further shaped into Gaussian shapes with fidelity exceeding 99\%. The temporal entanglement and shaping of photons based on interference may solve the shape mismatch issues in large-scale optical quantum networks.
Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures