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Controlling two-photon emission from superluminal and accelerating index perturbations

Nature Physics volume 18, pages 67–74 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Sources of photons with controllable quantum properties such as entanglement and squeezing are desired for applications in quantum information, metrology and sensing. However, fine-grained control over these properties is hard to achieve, especially for two-photon sources. Here we propose a mechanism for the controlled generation of entangled and squeezed photon pairs using superluminal or accelerating modulations of the refractive index in a medium or both. By leveraging time-changing dielectric media, where quantum vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field can be converted into photon pairs, we show that energy and momentum conservation in multimode systems give rise to frequency and angle correlations of photon pairs controlled by the trajectory of index modulation. In our examples, these radiation effects are two-photon analogues of Cherenkov and synchrotron radiation by moving charged particles such as free electrons. We find that synchrotron-like radiation into photon pairs exhibits frequency correlations that can enable a heralded single-photon frequency comb. These effects are sensitive to the local density of photonic states and can be strongly enhanced using photonic nanostructures. For example, index modulations propagating near the surface of graphene produce entangled pairs of graphene plasmons with high efficiency.

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Fig. 1: Analogy between free-electron radiation and quantum radiation from moving index perturbations.
Fig. 2: Two-photon Cherenkov radiation by a superluminal index perturbation.
Fig. 3: Two-photon synchrotron radiation by an accelerating index perturbation.
Fig. 4: Emission of entangled plasmon pairs by moving index perturbations near graphene.

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Source data are provided with this paper. All other data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Y. Salamin and I. Kaminer for helpful discussions. This material is based on work supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under agreement no. HR00112090081. This work is supported in part by the US Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies under award no. W911NF-18-2-0048. This material is also based on work supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award no. FA9550-20-1-0115. J.S. was supported in part by the Department of Defense NDSEG fellowship no. F-1730184536. N.R. was supported by the Department of Energy Fellowship DE-FG02-97ER25308.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Jamison Sloan

  2. Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Jamison Sloan & Marin Soljačić

  3. Department of Physics, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Nicholas Rivera, John D. Joannopoulos & Marin Soljačić

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J.S. conceived the idea for the project. J.S. and N.R. performed the calculations and analysed the results. M.S. and J.D.J. supervised the work. J.S. wrote the manuscript with input from all the authors.

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Correspondence to Jamison Sloan.

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Sloan, J., Rivera, N., Joannopoulos, J.D. et al. Controlling two-photon emission from superluminal and accelerating index perturbations. Nat. Phys. 18, 67–74 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01428-4

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