Alexander Lvovsky

Abstract:

© 2020, The Author(s). Quantum phenomena such as entanglement can improve fundamental limits on the sensitivity of a measurement probe. In optical interferometry, a probe consisting of N entangled photons provides up to a N enhancement in phase sensitivity compared to a classical probe of the same energy. Here, we employ high-gain parametric down-conversion sources and photon-number-resolving detectors to perform interferometry with heralded quantum probes of sizes up to N = 8 (i.e. measuring up to 16-photon coincidences). Our probes are created by injecting heralded photon-number states into an interferometer, and in principle provide quantum-enhanced phase sensitivity even in the presence of significant optical loss. Our work paves the way toward quantum-enhanced interferometry using large entangled photonic states.

Abstract:

Optics is a promising platform in which to help realize the next generation of fast, parallel, and energy-efficient computation. We demonstrate a reconfigurable free-space optical multiplier that is capable of over 3000 computations in parallel, using spatial light modulators with a pixel resolution of only 340×340. This enables vector–matrix multiplication and parallel vector–vector multiplication with vector size of up to 56. Our design is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to simultaneously support optical implementation of reconfigurable, large-sized, and real-valued linear algebraic operations. Such an optical multiplier can serve as a building block of special-purpose optical processors such as optical neural networks and optical Ising machines.

Abstract:

Several spurious effects are known to degrade the performance of phase-only spatial light modulators. We introduce a comprehensive model that takes into account the major ones: curvature of the back panel, pixel crosstalk and the internal Fabry–Perot cavity. To estimate the model parameters with high accuracy, we generate blazed grating patterns and acquire the intensity response curves of the first and second diffraction orders. The quantitative model is used to generate compensating holograms, which can produce optical modes with high fidelity.