Entanglement has been recognized as being crucial when implementing various quantum information tasks. Nevertheless, quantifying entanglement for an unknown quantum state requires nonphysical operations or post-processing measurement data. For example, evaluation methods via quantum state tomography require vast amounts of measurement data and likely estimation. Although a direct entanglement determination has been reported for the unknown pure state, it is still tricky for the mixed state. In this work, assisted by weak measurement and deep learning technology, we directly detect the entanglement (namely, the concurrence) of a class of two-photon polarization-entangled mixed states both theoretically and experimentally according to the local photon spatial distributions after weak measurement. In this way, the number of projective bases is much smaller than that required in quantum state tomography.

Phase-coherent multi-tone lasers play a critical role in atomic, molecular, and optical physics. Among them, the Raman opeartion laser for manipulating atomic hyperfine qubits requires gigahertz bandwidth and low phase noise to retain long-term coherence. Raman operation lasers generated by directly modulated and frequency-multipled infrared lasers are compact and stable but lack feedback control to actively suppress the phase noise, which limits their performance in practical applications. In this work, we employ a fiber electro-optical modulator driven by a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) to modulate a monochromatic laser and employ a second-harmonic generation process to convert it to the visible domain, where the beat note of the Raman operation laser is stabilized by controlling the output frequency of VCO with a digital phase-locked loop (PLL). The low-frequency phase noise is effectively suppressed compared to the scheme without active feedback and it reaches -80dBc/Hz@5kHz with a 20 kHz loop bandwidth. Furthermore, this compact and robust scheme effectively reduces the system’s complexity and cost, which is promising for extensive application in atomic, molecular, and optical physics.

The optical microscopy image plays an important role in scientific research through the direct visualization of the nanoworld, where the imaging mechanism is described as the convolution of the point spread function (PSF) and emitters. Based on a priori knowledge of the PSF or equivalent PSF, it is possible to achieve more precise exploration of the nanoworld. However, it is an outstanding challenge to directly extract the PSF from microscopy images. Here, with the help of self-supervised learning, we propose a physics-informed masked autoencoder (PiMAE) that enables a learnable estimation of the PSF and emitters directly from the raw microscopy images. We demonstrate our method in synthetic data and real-world experiments with significant accuracy and noise robustness. PiMAE outperforms DeepSTORM and the Richardson–Lucy algorithm in synthetic data tasks with an average improvement of 19.6% and 50.7% (35 tasks), respectively, as measured by the normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) metric. This is achieved without prior knowledge of the PSF, in contrast to the supervised approach used by DeepSTORM and the known PSF assumption in the Richardson–Lucy algorithm. Our method, PiMAE, provides a feasible scheme for achieving the hidden imaging mechanism in optical microscopy and has the potential to learn hidden mechanisms in many more systems.

Mapping magnetic fields from different materials and structures can provide a powerful means for broad applications of activity probe and feature analysis. Here, we present a high-sensitivity and wide-bandwidth fiber-based quantum magnetometer at the scale of a few hundred micrometers. We propose a fiber-coupled diamond magnetometer. Tracking a pulsed optically detected magnetic resonance spectrum allows a magnetic field sensitivity of 103pT/Hz and a bandwidth of 2.6 kHz. Additionally, with an approach of coating the diamond surface with silver reflective film, both the fluorescence collection and excitation efficiency are significantly enhanced, and the sensitivity and bandwidth are expected to be further improved to 50pT/Hz and 4.1 kHz, respectively. Finally, this fiber-based quantum magnetometer is applied as a probe to successfully map the magnetic field induced by the current-carrying copper-wire mesh. Such a stable and compact magnetometer can provide a powerful tool in many areas of physical, chemical, and biological researches.

As a quantum resource, quantum coherence plays an important role in modern physics. Many coherence measures and their relations with entanglement have been proposed, and the dynamics of entanglement has been experimentally studied. However, the knowledge of general results for coherence dynamics in open systems is limited. Here we propose a coherence factorization law that describes the evolution of coherence passing through any noisy channels characterized by genuinely incoherent operations. We use photons to implement the quantum operations and experimentally verify the law for qubits and qutrits. Our work is a step toward understanding of the evolution of coherence when the system interacts with the environment, and will boost the study of more general laws of coherence.

Heralded single-photon source (HSPS) intrinsically suffers from the trade-off between the heralded single-photon rate and the single-photon purity. To break through this trade-off, one can apply multiplexing technology in different degrees of freedom that significantly improves the performance of the HSPS. Here, we propose a 1.5 μm chip-scale HSPS on lithium niobate on insulator by employing spectral multiplexing and active feed-forward spectral manipulating, and we demonstrate a proof-of-principle experiment with discrete fiber-based components. With continuous-wave laser pumping and three spectral modes multiplexed, our experimental results show that the spectral multiplexing improves the heralded single-photon rate by near threefold while keeping the g(2)(0) as low as 0.0006±0.0001 at a measured single-photon rate of 3.1 kHz. By measuring the joint spectral intensity, we show that the spectral multiplexing and feed-forward control effectively erase the frequency correlation of photon pairs. Moreover, we implement the Hong–Ou–Mandel interference between the spectrally multiplexed single photons and photons from an independent weak coherence source, which indicates that the multiplexed single photons are highly indistinguishable after the spectral manipulation. Our results pave a way for on-chip scalable and high-performance HSPS with spectral multiplexing toward deterministic single-photon emission.

Coherent conversion of microwave and optical photons can significantly expand the capabilities of information processing and communications systems. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the microwave-to-optical frequency conversion in a magneto-optical whispering gallery mode microcavity. By applying a magnetic field parallel to the microsphere equator, the intracavity optical field will be modulated when the magnon is excited by the microwave drive, leading to a microwave-to-optical conversion via the magnetic Stokes and anti-Stokes scattering processes. The observed single-sideband conversion phenomenon indicates a nontrivial optical photon–magnon interaction mechanism derived from the magnon that induced both the frequency shift and modulated coupling rate of optical modes. In addition, we demonstrate the single-sideband frequency conversion with an ultrawide tuning range up to 2.5 GHz, showing its great potential in microwave-to-optical conversion.

The microresonator-based soliton microcomb has shown a promising future in many applications. In this work, we report the fabrication of high quality (Q) Si3N4 microring resonators for soliton microcomb generation. By developing the fabrication process with crack isolation trenches and annealing, we can deposit thick stoichiometric Si3N4 film of 800 nm without cracks in the central area. The highest intrinsic Q of the Si3N4 microring obtained in our experiments is about 6×106, corresponding to a propagation loss as low as 0.058 dBm/cm. With such a high Q film, we fabricate microrings with the anomalous dispersion and demonstrate the generation of soliton microcombs with 100 mW on-chip pump power, with an optical parametric oscillation threshold of only 13.4 mW. Our Si3N4 integrated chip provides an ideal platform for researches and applications of nonlinear photonics and integrated photonics.

Interferometers are essential elements in classical and quantum optical systems. The strictly required stability when extracting the phase of photons is vulnerable to polarization variation and phase shift induced by environment disturbance. Here, we implement polarization-insensitive interferometers by combining silica planar light-wave circuit chips and Faraday rotator mirrors. Two asymmetric interferometers with temperature controllers are connected in series to evaluate the single-photon interference. Average interference visibility over 12 h is above 99%, and the variations are less than 0.5%, even with active random polarization disturbance. The experiment results verify that the hybrid chip is available for high-demand applications like quantum key distribution and entanglement measurement.