Abstract

We present a photonic wave packet construction that is immune to the decoherence effects induced by the action of the Lorentz group. The amplitudes of a pure quantum state representing the wave packet remain invariant, irrespective of the reference frame into which the wave packet has been transformed. Transmitted information is encoded in the helicity degrees of freedom of two correlated momentum modes. The helicity encoding is considered to be particularly suitable for free-space communication. The integral part of the story is information retrieval on the receiver’s side. We employed probably the simplest possible helicity (polarization) projection measurement originally studied by Peres and Terno. Remarkably, the same conditions ensuring the invariance of the wave packet also guarantee perfect distinguishability in the process of measuring the helicity.

© 2011 Optical Society of America

Optical Wigner functions for two-photon entangled wave packets

Yacob Ben-Aryeh, Yanhua H. Shih, and Morton H. Rubin
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 16(10) 1730-1736 (1999)

Measurement of one-photon and two-photon wave packets in spontaneous parametric downconversion

Yoon-Ho Kim
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 20(9) 1959-1966 (2003)

Wave packet shaping for a single-photon source

Azadeh Ahmadian and Rasoul Malekfar
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 38(3) 783-791 (2021)

Electron wave-packet dynamics in a relativistic electromagnetic field: 3-D analytical approximation

J. Peatross, C. Müller, and C. H. Keitel
Opt. Express 15(10) 6053-6061 (2007)

Complementarity analysis of interference between frequency-shifted photonic wave packets

Gustavo C. Amaral, Elisa F. Carneiro, Guilherme P. Temporão, and Jean Pierre von der Weid
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 35(3) 601-606 (2018)