Sulzer, Philipp
Date: Thursday, March 19, 2020
Time: 11:00
Place: ETH Zurich, scheduled Zoom meeting
Host: Jerome Faist
Ultrabroadband Electro-Optic Sampling: Time-Domain Quadratures and Noise Properties of Few-Femtosecond Gate Pulses
Philipp Sulzer
University of Konstanz, Germany
Recent years have seen a push to employ electro-optic sampling (EOS) for time-domain studies of quantum fluctuations via statistical readout [1,2]. The direct observation of the vacuum noise of the electromagnetic field represents an early breakthrough in this context. To better connect the new class of quantum experiments based on EOS to more established methods of quantum optics it is necessary to identify and access the conjugate variable to the electric field in the time-domain. I will demonstrate how a promising candidate for this quantity, the Hilbert transform [3], may be obtained by analyzing the full, frequency-resolved polarization state of the gating pulse after the nonlinear interaction in the electro-optic detection crystal [4]. This new capability will be crucial in achieving a full quantum tomography in the time domain. In the second part of my talk, I will address the interesting noise properties of ultrabroadband gating pulses generated from highly nonlinear fibers. While this has fundamental consequences for the statistical readout of electro-optic signals, I will demonstrate how these properties may be used to suppress intensity fluctuations in cascaded nonlinear mixing-steps. This results in a reduction of noise below the level of the laser oscillator itself, potentially even eliminating noise from quantum fluctuations [5].
[1] C. Riek, et al., Science 350, 420 (2015) ; C. Riek, et al. Nature 541, 376 (2017).
[2] I.-C. Benea-Chelmus, F. F. Settembrini, G. Scalari, and J. Faist, Nature 568, 202 (2019).
[3] S. Virally and B. Reulet, Phys. Rev. A 100, 023833 (2019).
[4] P. Sulzer, K. Oguchi, J. Huster, M. Kizmann, T. L. M. Guedes, A. Liehl, C. Beckh, A. S. Moskalenko, G. Burkard, D. V. Seletskiy, and A. Leitenstorfer (accepted for publication)
[5] P. Sulzer et al. (in preparation)