All-fiber source and sorter for multimode correlated photons

Photons occupying multiple spatial modes hold a great promise for implementing high-dimensional quantum communication. We use spontaneous four-wave mixing to generate multimode photon pairs in a few-mode fiber. We show the photons are correlated in the fiber mode basis using an all-fiber mode sorter. Our demonstration offers an essential building block for realizing high-dimensional quantum protocols based on standard, commercially available fibers, in an all-fiber configuration.

Full-Vectorial Fiber Mode Solver Based on a Discrete Hankel Transform

It is crucial to be time and resource-efficient when enabling and optimizing novel applications and functionalities of optical fibers, as well as accurate computation of the vectorial field components and the corresponding propagation constants of the guided modes in optical fibers. To address these needs, a novel full-vectorial fiber mode solver based on a discrete Hankel transform is introduced and validated here for the first time for rotationally symmetric fiber designs. It is shown that the effective refractive indices of the guided modes are computed with an absolute error of less than 10−4 with respect to analytical solutions of step-index and graded-index fiber designs. Computational speeds in the order of a few seconds allow to efficiently compute the relevant parameters, e.g., propagation constants and corresponding dispersion profiles, and to optimize fiber designs.