Non-local geometric phase in two-photon interferometry

Physical Review A, 2010

We propose a polarised intensity interferometry experiment, which measures the nonlocal Pancharatnam phase acquired by a pair of Hanbury Brown-Twiss photons. The setup involves two polarised thermal sources illuminating two polarised detectors. Varying the relative polarisation angle of the detectors introduces a two photon geometric phase. Local measurements at either detector do not reveal the effects of the phase, which is an optical analog of the multiparticle Aharonov-Bohm effect. The geometric phase sheds light on the three slit experiment and suggests ways of tuning entanglement.

Physical Review A, 2020

Light beam carrying spatially varying state of polarization generates space varying Pancharatnam-Berry geometric phase while propagating through homogeneous anisotropic medium. We show that determination of such space varying geometric phase provides a unique way to quantify the space varying polarization state of light using a single-shot interferometric measurement. We demonstrate this concept in a Mach-Zehnder interferometric arrangement using a linearly polarized reference light beam, where full information on the spatially varying polarization state is successfully recovered by quantifying the space varying geometric phase and the contrast of interference. The proposed method enables single-shot measurement of any space varying polarization state of light from the measured interference pattern with a polarized reference beam. This approach shows considerable potential for instantaneous mapping of complex space varying polarization of light in diverse applications, such as astronomy, biomedical imaging, nanophotonics, etc., where high precision and near real-time measurement of spatial polarization patterns are desirable.

Physical Review A, 2009

We report theoretical calculations and experimental observations of Pancharatnam's phase originating from arbitrary SU (2) transformations applied to polarization states of light. We have implemented polarimetric and interferometric methods which allow us to cover the full Poincaré sphere. As a distinctive feature, our interferometric array is robust against mechanical and thermal disturbances, showing that the polarimetric method is not inherently superior to the interferometric one, as previously assumed. Our strategy effectively amounts to feed an interferometer with two copropagating beams that are orthogonally polarized with respect to each other. It can be applied to different types of standard arrays, like a Michelson, a Sagnac, or a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. We exhibit the versatility of our arrangement by performing measurements of Pancharatnam's phases and fringe visibilities that closely fit the theoretical predictions. Our approach can be easily extended to deal with mixed states and to study decoherence effects.

2007

We describe an experiment where the phase and amplitude of the interference pattern of light going through an interferometer was varied by doing operations on quantum-correlated light that did not go through the interferometer. This was accomplished by sending a pair of polarization-entangled photons in separate directions, one to an interferometer and the other one to a phase shifter, in principle in a remote location. The interferometer was set up to put the state of the pair in a superposition of maximally entangled states.

Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2011

We present a novel interferometric arrangement that makes it possible to measure with great versatility geometric phases produced in polarization states of classical light. Our arrangement is robust against thermal and mechanical disturbances and can be set up in a Mach-Zehnder, a Michelson or a Sagnac configuration. We present results concerning the geometric phase as an extension of previous measurements of the Pancharatnam, or total phase. The geometric phase is obtained by compensating the dynamical contribution to the total phase, so as to extract out of it a purely geometric phase. This can be achieved over trajectories on the Poincaré sphere that are not necessarily restricted to be great circles (geodesics). We thus demonstrate the feasibility of our method for dynamical extraction of the geometric contribution to the total phase, a prerequisite for building geometric quantum gates. Although our results correspond to polarization states of classical light, the same methodology could be applied in the case of polarization states of single photons.

Journal of the Optical Society of America B, 2016

We generate the non-separable state of polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM) using a laser beam. The generated state undergoes a cyclic polarization evolution which introduces a Pancharatnam geometric phase to the polarization state and in turn a relative phase in the non-separable state. We experimentally study the violation of Bell -CHSH inequality for different Pancharatnam phases introduced by various cyclic polarization evolutions with linear and circular states as measurement bases. While measuring in linear bases, the Bell-CHSH parameter oscillates with Pancharatnam phase. One can overcome this dependence by introducing a relative phase in one of the projecting state. However for measurement in circular bases, the Pancharatnam phase does not affect the Bell-CHSH violation.

Physical Review A, 2010

We present a method to measure the geometric phase defined for three internal states of a photon (polarizations) using a three-pinhole interferometer. From the interferogram, we can extract the geometric phase related to the three-vertex Bargmann invariant as the area of a triangle formed by interference fringes. Unlike the conventional methods, our method does not involve the state evolution. Moreover, the phase calibration of the interferometer and the elimination of the dynamical phase are not required. The gauge invariance of the geometric phase corresponds to the fact that the area of the triangle is never changed by the local phase shift in each internal state.

Physical Review A

Grover multiports are higher-dimensional generalizations of beam-splitters, in which input to any one of the four ports has equal probability of exiting at any of the same four ports, including the input port. In this paper, we demonstrate that interferometers built from such multiports have novel features. For example, when combined with two-photon input and coincidence measurements, it is shown that such interferometers have capabilities beyond those of standard beam splitterbased interferometers, such as easily-controlled interpolation between Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) and anti-HOM behavior. Further, it is shown that the Grover-based analog of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer can make three separate phase measurements simultaneously. By arranging the transmission lines between the two multiports to lie in different planes, the same interferometer acts as a higherdimensional Sagnac interferometer, allowing rotation rates about three different axes to be measured with a single device.

Physical Review B, 2018

Pancharatnam's experimental findings in the nineteen fifties on amplitude interferometry of polarized light was an early example of Berry phase. But a similar experimental realization of geometric phase in the context of solid-state electronic systems where the polarization state of the photon is replaced by spin-polarized states of the electron remains unexplored. This is primarily due to the fact that the generation of Pancharatnam's geometric phase involves discrete number of cyclic projective measurements on the polarized states of light and an equivalent cyclic operation on electron spin is way much harder to implement in a solid-state setting. In the present study, we show that the edge states of quantum spin Hall effect (QSHE) in conjunction with tunnel coupled spin-polarized electrodes (SPE) provide us with a unique opportunity to generate Pancharatnam's type geometric phase locally in space which can be detected via electronic current measurements. We show that controlled manipulation of the polarization directions of the SPEs results in coherent oscillations in the crosscorrelated current noise which can be attributed to a multi-particle version of Pancharatnam's geometric phase and is directly related to the phenomenon of intensity interferometry. We demonstrate that the interference patterns produced due to the manipulation of geometric phase in our proposed setup show a remarkable immunity to orbital dephasing owing to its spatially local origin.

Physical Review A, 2014

We report polarimetric measurements of geometric phases that are generated by evolving polarized photons along nongeodesic trajectories on the Poincaré sphere. The core of our polarimetric array consists of seven wave plates that are traversed by a single-photon beam. With this array, any SU(2) transformation can be realized. By exploiting the gauge invariance of geometric phases under U(1) local transformations, we nullify the dynamical contribution to the total phase, thereby making the latter coincide with the geometric phase. We demonstrate our arrangement to be insensitive to various sources of noise entering it. This makes the single-beam, polarimetric array a promising, versatile tool for testing robustness of geometric phases against noise.