Bright squeezed vacuum for two-photon spectroscopy: simultaneously high resolution in time and frequency, space and wavevector.

Entangled photons offer two advantages for two-photon absorption spectroscopy. One of them, the linear scaling of two-photon absorption rate with the input photon flux, is valid only at very low photon fluxes and is therefore impractical. The other is the overcoming of the classical constraints for simultaneous resolution in time-frequency and in space-wavevector. Here we consider bright squeezed vacuum (BSV) as an alternative to entangled photons. The efficiency increase it offers in comparison with coherent light is modest, but it does not depend on the photon flux. Moreover, and this is what we show in this work, BSV also provides simultaneously high resolution in time and frequency, and in space and wavevector. In our experiment, we measure the widths of the second-order correlation functions in space, time, frequency, and angle and demonstrate the violation of the constraint given by the Fourier transformation, in the case of photon pairs, known as the Mancini criterion of entanglement.

Direct measurement of the coupled spatiotemporal coherence of parametric down-conversion under negative group-velocity dispersion.

We present a direct measurement of the spatiotemporal coherence of parametric down-conversion in the range of negative group-velocity dispersion. In this case, the frequency-angular spectra are ring-shaped, and temporal coherence is coupled to spatial coherence. Correspondingly, the lack of coherence due to spatial displacement can be compensated for with the introduction of time delay. We show a simple technique, based on a modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which allows us to measure time coherence and near-field space coherence simultaneously, with complete control over both variables. This technique is also suitable for the measurement of second-order coherence, where the main applications are related to two-photon spectroscopy.