Interference tunable second harmonic generation for two-dimensional materials in layered structures.

We experimentally study the tunability of second harmonic generation (SHG) from a two-dimensional (2D) material in a 2D material/dielectric film/substrate layered structure. Such tunability arises from two interferences: one is between the incident fundamental light and its reflected light, and the other is between the upward second harmonic (SH) light and the reflected downward SH light. When both interferences are constructive, the SHG is maximally enhanced; it becomes attenuated if either of them is destructive. The maximal signal can be obtained when both interferences are perfectly constructive, which can be realized by choosing a highly reflective substrate and an appropriate thickness for a dielectric film that has a large difference in its refractive indices at the fundamental and the SH wavelengths. Our experiments demonstrate variations of three orders of magnitude in the SHG signals from a monolayer MoS2/TiO2/Ag layered structure.

Generation of photon pairs by stimulated emission in ring resonators.

Third-order parametric downconversion (TOPDC) describes a class of nonlinear interactions in which a pump photon is converted into a photon triplet. This process can occur spontaneously or it can be stimulated by seeding fields. Here we show that stimulated TOPDC (StTOPDC) can be exploited for the generation of quantum correlated photon pairs. We model StTOPDC in a microring resonator, predicting observable pair generation rates in a microring engineered for third-harmonic generation, and we examine the peculiar features of this approach when compared with second-order spontaneous parametric downconversion and spontaneous four-wave mixing. We conclude that if the experimental difficulties associated with implementing StTOPDC can be overcome, it may soon be possible to demonstrate this process in resonant integrated devices.

Generation of hyper-entangled states in strongly coupled topological defects.

We investigate spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC) in a waveguide array supporting two strongly coupled topological guided modes. We show that it is possible to generate photon pairs that are hyper-entangled in energy and path. We study the state robustness against positional disorder of the waveguides, in terms of Schmidt number (SN), fidelity, and density matrix. We show that quantum correlations are in general robust due to the peculiar interplay between structure topology and second-order nonlinear interaction.

Suppression of Parasitic Nonlinear Processes in Spontaneous Four-Wave Mixing with Linearly Uncoupled Resonators.

We report on a signal-to-noise ratio characterizing the generation of identical photon pairs of more than 4 orders of magnitude in a ring resonator system. Parasitic noise, associated with single-pump spontaneous four-wave mixing, is essentially eliminated by employing a novel system design involving two resonators that are linearly uncoupled but nonlinearly coupled. This opens the way to a new class of integrated devices exploiting the unique properties of identical photon pairs in the same optical mode.

Spontaneous parametric down conversion in a doubly resonant one-dimensional photonic crystal.

We study spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) in a one-dimensional photonic crystal designed to operate in a doubly resonant configuration, where the frequencies of the pump and the generated photons are both tuned to band-edge resonances. We investigate the spectral correlations of the generated photons as a function of the spectral width of the pump, and demonstrate that the SPDC generation rate can scale with the fifth power of the structure length in the limit of a quasi-continuous-wave pump. We show that such an unusual scaling can be simply connected with the scaling of second-harmonic generation in the same structure, illustrating the general link between spontaneous and stimulated parametric nonlinear processes.

Stimulated four-wave mixing in linearly uncoupled resonators.

We experimentally demonstrate stimulated four-wave mixing in two linearly uncoupled integrated $ {{\rm Si}_3}{{\rm N}_4} $Si3N4 micro-resonators. In our structure, the resonance combs of each resonator can be tuned independently, with the energy transfer from one resonator to the other occurring in the presence of a nonlinear interaction. This method allows flexible and efficient on-chip control of the nonlinear interaction, and is readily applicable to other third-order nonlinear phenomena.

Dispersion measurement assisted by a stimulated parametric process.

Dispersion plays a major role in the behavior of light inside photonic devices. Current state-of-the-art dispersion measurement techniques utilize linear interferometers that can be applied to devices with small dispersion-length products. However, linear interferometry often requires beam alignment and phase stabilization. Recently, common-path nonlinear interferometers in the spontaneous regime have been used to demonstrate alignment-free and phase-stable dispersion measurements. However, they require single-photon detectors, resulting in high system cost and long integration times. We overcome these issues by utilizing a nonlinear interferometer in the stimulated regime and demonstrate the ability to measure the dispersion of a device with a dispersion-length product as small as 0.009 ps/nm at a precision of 0.0002 ps/nm. Moreover, this regime allows us to measure dispersion with shorter integration times (in comparison to the spontaneous regime) and conventional optical components and detectors.

Stimulated emission tomography: beyond polarization.

In this work, we demonstrate the use of stimulated emission tomography to characterize a hyperentangled state generated by spontaneous parametric downconversion in a cw-pumped source. In particular, we consider the generation of hyperentangled states consisting of photon pairs entangled in polarization and path. These results extend the capability of stimulated emission tomography beyond the polarization degree of freedom and demonstrate the use of this technique to study states in higher dimension Hilbert spaces.

Quantum Interference Control of Photocurrents in Semiconductors by Nonlinear Optical Absorption Processes.

We report experiments demonstrating quantum interference control based on two nonlinear optical absorption processes in semiconductors. We use two optical beams of frequencies ω and 3ω/2 incident on AlGaAs, and measure the injection current due to the interference between 2- and 3-photon absorption processes. We analyze the dependence of the injection current on the intensities and phases of the incident fields.

Nonlinear Coupling of Linearly Uncoupled Resonators.

We demonstrate a system composed of two resonators that are coupled solely through a nonlinear interaction, and where the linear properties of each resonator can be controlled locally. We show that this class of dynamical systems has peculiar properties with important consequences for the study of classical and quantum nonlinear optical phenomena. As an example we discuss the case of dual-pump spontaneous four-wave mixing.

Three-Photon Discrete-Energy-Entangled W State in an Optical Fiber.

We experimentally demonstrate the generation of a three-photon discrete-energy-entangled W state using multiphoton-pair generation by spontaneous four-wave mixing in an optical fiber. We show that, by making use of prior information on the photon source, we can verify the state produced by this source without resorting to frequency conversion.

Strong Nonlinear Coupling in a Si_{3}N_{4} Ring Resonator.

We demonstrate that nondegenerate four-wave mixing in a Si_{3}N_{4} microring resonator can result in a nonlinear coupling rate between two optical fields exceeding their energy dissipation rate in the resonator, corresponding to strong nonlinear coupling. We demonstrate that this leads to a Rabi-like splitting, for which we provide a theoretical description in agreement with our experimental results. This yields new insight into the dynamics of nonlinear optical interactions in microresonators and access to novel phenomena.

Power-flow-based design strategy for Bloch surface wave biosensors.

We propose a novel semi-analytic design strategy for dielectric one-dimensional multilayer biosensors that is based on a relation between the angular sensitivity and the optical power flow of the Bloch surface wave guided by the multilayer. We show that our strategy can be used to optimize both the sensor's sensitivity and figure-of-merit without the need for extensive numerical parameter sweeps.

Jerk Current: A Novel Bulk Photovoltaic Effect.

We investigate a physical divergence of the third order polarization susceptibility representing a photoinduced current in biased crystalline insulators. This current grows quadratically with illumination time in the absence of momentum relaxation and saturation; we refer to it as the jerk current. Two contributions to the current are identified. The first is a hydrodynamic acceleration of optically injected carriers by the static electric field, and the second is the change in the carrier injection rate in the presence of the static electric field. The jerk current can have a component perpendicular to the static field, a feature not captured by standard hydrodynamic descriptions of carriers in electric fields. We suggest an experiment to detect the jerk current and some of its interesting features.

Why you should not use the electric field to quantize in nonlinear optics.

We show that using the electric field as a quantization variable in nonlinear optics leads to incorrect expressions for the squeezing parameters in spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) and conversion rates in frequency conversion. This observation is related to the fact that if the electric field is written as a linear combination of bosonic creation and annihilation operators one cannot satisfy Maxwell's equations in a nonlinear dielectric.

Truly unentangled photon pairs without spectral filtering.

We demonstrate that an integrated silicon microring resonator is capable of efficiently producing photon pairs that are completely unentangled; such pairs are a key component of heralded single-photon sources. A dual-channel interferometric coupling scheme can be used to independently tune the quality factors associated with the pump and signal and idler modes, yielding a biphoton wavefunction with a Schmidt number arbitrarily close to unity. This will permit the generation of heralded single-photon states with unit purity.

Multidimensional characterization of an entangled photon-pair source via stimulated emission tomography.

Using stimulated emission tomography, we characterize an entangled photon-pair source in the energy and polarization degrees of freedom, with a precision far exceeding what could be obtained by quantum state tomography. Through this multidimensional tomography we find that energy-polarization correlations are a cause of polarization-entanglement degradation, demonstrating that this technique provides useful information for source engineering and can accelerate the development of quantum information processing systems dependent on many degrees of freedom.

Continuous wave photon pair generation in silicon-on-insultator waveguides and ring resonators and erratum: comment.

We consider the generation of photon pairs by spontaneous four-wave mixing in ring resonators, as described by Clemmen et al. in Opt. Express17, 16558 (2009). We show that the theoretical limit predicted for the generation rate in their Erratum-Opt. Express 18, 14107 (2010)-is far too large due to an incorrect definition of a field enhancement factor.

Identification of photocurrents in topological insulators.

Optical injection and detection of charge currents is an alternative to conventional transport and photoemission measurements, avoiding the necessity of invasive contact that may disturb the system being examined. This is a particular concern for analyzing the surface states of topological insulators. In this work one- and two-color sources of photocurrents are isolated and examined in epitaxial thin films of Bi2Se3. We demonstrate that optical excitation and terahertz detection simultaneously captures one- and two-color photocurrent contributions, which has not been required for other material systems. A method is devised to extract the two components, and in doing so each can be related to surface or bulk excitations through symmetry. The separation of such photocurrents in topological insulators opens a new avenue for studying these materials by all-optical methods.

High efficiency in mode-selective frequency conversion.

Frequency conversion (FC) is an enabling process in many quantum information protocols. Recently, it has been observed that upconversion efficiencies in single-photon, mode-selective FC are limited to around 80%. In this Letter, we argue that these limits can be understood as time-ordering corrections (TOCs) that modify the joint conversion amplitude of the process. Furthermore, using a simple scaling argument, we show that recently proposed cascaded FC protocols that overcome the aforementioned limitations act as "attenuators" of the TOCs. This observation allows us to argue that very similar cascaded architectures can be used to attenuate TOCs in photon generation via spontaneous parametric downconversion. Finally, by using the Magnus expansion, we argue that the TOCs, which are usually considered detrimental for FC efficiency, can also be used to increase the efficiency of conversion in partially mode-selective FC.