Towards Low-frequency Squeezed Light and Its Applications with Four-wave Mixing in Rubidium Vapor

Abstract

We study a variety of mechanisms that introduce noise into squeezed light generated by a four-wave mixing (4WM) process in Rb vapor. The noise from the seeding beam itself is a general noise that appears in any squeezed light generated from a seeding process. This noise dominates in the squeezed light at acoustic and lower measurement frequencies. A second excess noise source is observed in the twin beams pumped by either a diode laser system or a Ti:sapphire laser system. This excess noise is much stronger in the diode laser systems. It is present in the twin beams at measurement frequencies when the 4WM gain is reduced toward unity. Most of this excess noise can be removed with a dual-seeded 4WM scheme. A third noise source we examine is from a two-beam coupling that degrades the squeezing of the dual-seeded 4WM process at low frequencies of the order of the atomic transition linewidth. This noise can be avoided by seeding skew rays in the 4WM gain region. This gives us an insight to solve this "cross talk" problem by imaging the source in the 4WM gain region. In addition to studying noise sources, we propose a gain-independent calibration scheme that relies on higher order correlation function for the absolute calibration of photodiodes.

Having low frequency squeezing is really important if we record quantum images with a CCD camera, which has a slow shutter speed. Also, it's been very difficult for people to get low-frequency squeezing. We obtain a record level of low-frequency squeezing using a simple dual-seeding technique. With this study of noise sources we are closer to having a portable quantum light source using diode lasers.