Alessia Allevi

Three-mode entanglement by interlinked nonlinear interactions in optical χ (2) media

We address the generation of fully inseparable three-mode entangled states of radiation by interlinked nonlinear interactions in χ(2) media. We show how three-mode entanglement can be used to realize symmetric and asymmetric telecloning machines, which achieve optimal fidelity for coherent states. An experimental implementation involving a single nonlinear crystal in which the two interactions take place simultaneously is suggested. Preliminary experimental results showing the feasibility and the effectiveness of the interaction scheme with a seeded crystal are also presented.

Sub-shot-noise photon-number correlation in a mesoscopic twin beam of light

We demonstrate sub-shot-noise photon-number correlations in a (temporal) multimode mesoscopic ({approx}10{sup 3} detected photons) twin beam produced by picosecond-pulsed spontaneous nondegenerate parametric down-conversion. We have separately detected the signal and idler distributions of photons collected in twin coherence areas and found that the variance of the photon-count difference goes below the shot-noise limit by 3.25 dB. The number of temporal modes contained in the twin beam, as well as the size of the twin coherence areas, depends on the pump intensity. Our scheme is based on spontaneous down-conversion and thus does not suffer from limitations due to the finite gain of the parametric process. Twin beams are also used to demonstrate the conditional preparation of a nonclassical (sub-Poissonian) state.

Self-consistent characterization of light statistics

We demonstrate the possibility of a self-consistent characterization of the photon-number statistics of a light field by using photoemissive detectors with internal gain simply endowed with linear input/output responses. The method can be applied to both microscopic and mesoscopic photon-number regimes. The detectors must operate in the linear range without the need for photon-counting capabilities.

Photon-number statistics with Silicon photomultipliers

We present a description of the operation of a multi-pixel detector in the presence of non-negligible dark-count and cross-talk effects. We apply the model to devise self-consistent calibration strategies to be performed on the very light under investigation.

Measuring high-order photon-number correlations in experiments with multimode pulsed quantum states

We implement a direct detection scheme based on hybrid photodetectors to experimentally investigate high-order correlations for detected photons by means of quantities that can be experimentally accessed. We show their usefulness in fully characterizing a multimode twin-beam state in comparison with classical states and, in particular, we introduce a nonclassicality criterion based on a simple linear combination of high-order correlation functions. Our scheme is self-consistent, allowing the estimation of all the involved parameters (quantum eciency, number of modes and

Holography by nondegenerate χ (2) interactions

We consider noncollinear interaction among three amplitude-modulated plane waves in a uniaxial crystal under type I phase-matching conditions. If one among the interacting fields can be taken as undepleted during the interaction, the remaining two fields are holographic replicas of each other: the undepleted field acts as the reference field in holography. We develop a general method to calculate the holographic wave front generated by a nonplane object wave front and a plane reference wave front. We present experiments in which a holographic image of an object consisting of a pointlike light source is obtained by choosing the object- and reference-field frequencies among ω1,ω2, and ω3 (with ω3=ω1+ω2) in any of the possible combinations.

Coherence properties of high-gain twin beams

Twin-beam coherence properties are analyzed both in the spatial and spectral domains at high-gain regime including pump depletion. The increase of the size of intensity auto- and cross-correlation areas at increasing pump power is replaced by a decrease in the pump depletion regime. This effect is interpreted as a progressive loss in the mode selection occurring at high-gain amplification. The experimental determination of the number of spatio-spectral modes from

Wigner function of pulsed fields by direct detection

g^{(2)}

Conditional measurements on multimode pairwise entangled states from spontaneous parametric downconversion

-function measurements confirms this explanation.

Spatial properties of twin-beam correlations at low- to high-intensity transition

We present the reconstruction of the Wigner function of some classical pulsed optical states obtained by direct measurement of the detected-photon probability distributions of the state displaced by a coherent field. We use a photodetector endowed with internal gain, which is operated in the non-photon-resolving regime. The measurements are performed up to mesoscopic intensities (up to more than 30 photons per pulse). The method can be applied to characterize nonclassical continuous-variable states.