Prof. Maria Chekhova: "Parametric down-conversion: from faint to bright nonclassical light "
The talk will have two parts with a short break in between:
Part 1: generation of photon pairs and entanglement
Part 2: bright squeezed vacuum, quadrature squeezing and twin beams Each part will take 30-40 minutes with time for questions In this talk, I will describe spontaneous parametric down-conversion, with a focus on the typical nonclassical (quantum) features of light that it produces.
I will show how the efficiency of this process can be tuned from very low, where it generates pairs of entangled photons, to very high, where it generates bright squeezed vacuum. In each case, different nonclassical features can be observed: for photon pairs, we find tight correlation in frequency/time and angle of emission/position; for bright squeezed vacuum, we find photon-number correlations or quadrature squeezing.