Abstract

Manipulating Fock states in a solid state environment is a milestone towards the development of scalable quantum information systems from a fundamental and applied research point of view. Such an implementation relies on a source of flying quantum bits encoded on single indistinguishable photons. In quantum physics, indistinguishability refers to the ability of photons with similar spectral, spatial and polarization properties to bunch when arriving simultaneously on two opposite sides of a beam splitter. This coalescence effect, which was demonstrated for the first time in 1987 by Hong, Ou and Mandel, is commonly studied in a two-photon interference experiment measuring the joint photodetection at the beam splitter outputs.

© 2015 IEEE