Mini Squeezers Towards Integrated Systems

Abstract

Squeezed states of light are quantum states that can be used in numerous protocols for quantum computation and quantum communication. Their generation in labora- tories has been investigated before, but they still lack compactness and practicality to easily integrate them into larger experiments. This thesis considers two experiments: one conducted in France, the miniOPO; and one conducted in Australia, the SquOPO. Both are new designs of compact sources of squeezed states of light towards an integrated system. The miniOPO is a linear cavity of 5mm length between the end of a fiber and a curved mirror with a PPKTP crystal of 1mm inside it. The squeezing generated in this cavity is coupled into the fiber to be able to be brought to a measurement device (homodyne) or to a larger experiment. The cavity is resonant for the squeezed light and the pump light, and locked in frequency using self-locking effects due to absorption of the pump in the crystal. The double resonance is achieved by changing the temperature of the crystal. Two different fibers have been tested in this experiment, a standard single-mode fiber and a photonic large core single-mode fiber. The squeezing obtained is still quite low (0.5dB with the standard fiber and 0.9dB for the photonic fiber) but a number of ameliorations are investigated to increase these levels in the future. The SqOPO is a monolithic square cavity made in a Lithium Niobate crystal using four total internal reflections on the four faces of the square to define an optical mode for the squeezed mode and the pump mode. The light is coupled in the resonator using frustrated internal reflection with prisms. The distance between the prisms and the resonator defined the coupling of the light, which allows us to control the finesse of the light in the resonator and by using birefringent prisms it is possible to tune independently the two frequencies in the resonator to achieve an optimal regime. The frequency of the light is locked using absorption of the pump light in the resonator to achieve self-locking, and double resonance is controlled by tuning the temperature of the crystal. We demonstrated 2.6dB of vacuum squeezing with this system. Once again, the amount of squeezing is low, but ameliorations that could be implemented in the future are discussed.