Demonstration of Controllable Temporal Distinguishability in a Three-Photon States

摘要

Multi-photon interference is at the heart of the recently proposed linear optical quantum computing scheme and plays an essential role in many protocols in quantum information. Indistinguishability is what leads to the effect of quantum interference. Here we report an experiment to implement the scheme to quantify the degree of quantify the degree of multi-photon distinguishability for three-photon case. We are able to generate three photons with different degrees of temporal distinguishability and demonstrate how to characterize them by the visibility of three-photon interference. This method of quantitative description of multi-photon indistinguishability will have practical implications in the implementation of quantum information protocols.