Generation of sub-MHz and spectrally-bright biphotons from hot atomic vapors with a phase mismatch-free scheme

We utilized the all-copropagating scheme, which maintains the phase-match condition, in the spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) process to generate biphotons from a hot atomic vapor. The linewidth and spectral brightness of our biphotons surpass those of the biphotons produced with the hot-atom SFWM in the previous works. Moreover, the generation rate of the sub-MHz biphoton source in this work can also compete with those of the sub-MHz biphoton sources of the cold-atom SFWM or cavity-assisted spontaneous parametric down conversion. Here, the biphoton linewidth is tunable for an order of magnitude. As we tuned the linewidth to 610 kHz, the generation rate per linewidth is 1,500 pairs/(s.MHz) and the maximum two-photon correlation function, g(s,as)((2)), of the biphotons is 42. This g(s,as)((2)), violates the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality for classical light by 440 tblds, and demonstrates that the biphotons have a high purity. By increasing the pump power by 16 folds, we further enhanced the generation rate per linewidth to 2.3x10(4) pairs/(s.MHz), while the maximum g(s,as)((2) )became 6.7. In addition, we are able to tune the linewidth down to 290 +/- 20 kHz. This is the narrowest linewidth to date among all single-mode biphoton sources of room-temperature and hot media. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

Utilizing the all-copropagating scheme in a hot atomic vapor, researchers have achieved high brightness biphotons with tunable linewidth and competitive generation rates. The generated biphotons exhibit high purity and surpass previous works in terms of linewidth and spectral brightness, offering potential applications in quantum information processing.