APL Photonics (Mar 2023)

Witnessing entangled two-photon absorption via quantum interferometry

  • Áulide Martínez-Tapia,
  • Samuel Corona-Aquino,
  • Freiman Triana-Arango,
  • Chenglong You,
  • Rui-Bo Jin,
  • Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza,
  • Shi-Hai Dong,
  • Alfred B. U’Ren,
  • Roberto de J. León-Montiel

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0128249
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8, no. 3
pp. 036104 – 036104-7

Abstract

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Recent investigations have suggested that the use of non-classical states of light, such as entangled photon pairs, may open new and exciting avenues in experimental two-photon absorption spectroscopy. Despite several experimental studies of entangled two-photon absorption (eTPA), there is still a heated debate on whether eTPA has truly been observed. This interesting debate has arisen mainly because it has recently been argued that single-photon-loss mechanisms, such as scattering or hot-band absorption, may mimic the expected entangled-photon linear absorption behavior. In this work, we focus on transmission measurements of eTPA and explore three different two-photon quantum interferometers in the context of assessing eTPA. We demonstrate that the so-called N00N-state configuration is the only one among those considered insensitive to linear (single-photon) losses. Remarkably, our results show that N00N states may become a potentially powerful tool for quantum spectroscopy, placing them as a strong candidate for the certification of eTPA in an arbitrary sample.