Generation of multi-photon Fock states at telecommunication wavelength using picosecond pulsed light

Multi-photon Fock states have diverse applications such as optical quantum information processing. For the implementation of quantum information processing, it is desirable that Fock states be generated within the telecommunication wavelength band, particularly in the C-band (1530-1565 nm). This is because mature optical communication technologies can be leveraged for the transmission, manipulation, and detection. Additionally, to achieve high-speed quantum information processing, it is desirable for Fock states to be generated in short optical pulses, as this allows embedding lots of information in the time domain. In this paper, we report the first generation of picosecond pulsed multi-photon Fock states (single-photon and two-photon states) in the C-band with Wigner negativities, which are verified by pulsed homodyne tomography. In our experimental setup, we utilize a single-pixel superconducting nanostrip photon-number-resolving detector (SNSPD), which is expected to facilitate the high-rate generation of various quantum states. This capability stems from the high temporal resolution of SNSPDs (50 ps in our case) allowing us to increase the repetition frequency of pulsed light from the conventional MHz range to the GHz range, although in this experiment the repetition frequency is limited to 10 MHz due to the bandwidth of the homodyne detector. Consequently, our experimental setup is anticipated to serve as a prototype of a high-speed optical quantum state generator for ultrafast quantum information processing at telecommunication wavelength.
Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures