ABSTRACT
High-gain parametric down-conversion (PDC) is inevitably accompanied by cascaded up-conversion (CUpC) of PDC radiation in a nonlinear crystal even if CUpC is nonphase matched. Here we study experimentally and theoretically the spectral properties of broadband phase-matched and nonphase-matched CUpC radiation in a beta barium borate (BBO) crystal. Our calculations of the normalized second-order correlation function predict the super-bunching of CUpC radiation.
ABSTRACT
The rate of an n-photon effect generally scales as the nth order autocorrelation function of the incident light, which is high for light with strong photon-number fluctuations. Therefore, "noisy" light sources are much more efficient for multiphoton effects than coherent sources with the same mean power, pulse duration, and repetition rate. Here we generate optical harmonics of the order of 2-4 from a bright squeezed vacuum, a state of light consisting of only quantum noise with no coherent component. We observe up to 2 orders of magnitude enhancement in the generation of optical harmonics due to ultrafast photon-number fluctuations. This feature is especially important for the nonlinear optics of fragile structures, where the use of a noisy pump can considerably increase the effect without overcoming the damage threshold.
ABSTRACT
We report on the observation of an unusual type of parametric downconversion. In the regime where collinear degenerate emission is in the anomalous range of group-velocity dispersion, its spectrum is restricted in both angle and wavelength. Detuning from exact collinear-degenerate phase-matching leads to a ring shape of the wavelength-angular spectrum, suggesting a new type of spatiotemporal coherence and entanglement of photon pairs. By imposing a phase varying in a specific way in both angle and wavelength, one can obtain an interesting state of an entangled photon pair, with the two photons being never at the same point at the same time.
