Looking Beyond Visibility: Resolving the Temporal Structure of Continuous-Wave Four-Photon Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference
Abstract
Hong-Ou-Mandel interference underpins many photonic quantum information protocols and is commonly characterized by a single visibility parameter. This quantity is typically obtained by averaging over a fixed coincidence window, thereby discarding details of the underlying temporal structure that are critical in continuous-wave processes. Four-photon interference with continuous-wave sources furthermore requires photon pairs with long coherence times, which we generate in microring resonators and measure with ultrafast time-resolved detection. Here, we model and resolve their interference and temporal structure by recording all four photon arrival times and mapping their relative delays onto a three-dimensional coincidence histogram relative to a trigger detection. The resulting structure preserves relative arrival-time correlations that are usually discarded and enables post-processed optimization of coincidence windows to trade off visibility against count rate. This method provides a general benchmark for continuous-wave sources in interference-based quantum network protocols.
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BibTeX
@misc{haussler2026looking,
title = {{Looking Beyond Visibility: Resolving the Temporal Structure of Continuous-Wave Four-Photon Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference}},
author = {Sabine Häussler and Meritxell Cabrejo-Ponce and Ana Maria Torres and Baghdasar Baghdasaryan and Karen Lozano-Mendéz and Fabian Steinlechner},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.21909},
eprint = {2610.21909},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21909},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Looking Beyond Visibility: Resolving the Temporal Structure of Continuous-Wave Four-Photon Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference
AU - Sabine Häussler
AU - Meritxell Cabrejo-Ponce
AU - Ana Maria Torres
AU - Baghdasar Baghdasaryan
AU - Karen Lozano-Mendéz
AU - Fabian Steinlechner
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/15
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.21909
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21909
AB - Hong-Ou-Mandel interference underpins many photonic quantum information protocols and is commonly characterized by a single visibility parameter. This quantity is typically obtained by averaging over a fixed coincidence window, thereby discarding details of the underlying temporal structure that are critical in continuous-wave processes. Four-photon interference with continuous-wave sources furthermore requires photon pairs with long coherence times, which we generate in microring resonators and measure with ultrafast time-resolved detection. Here, we model and resolve their interference and temporal structure by recording all four photon arrival times and mapping their relative delays onto a three-dimensional coincidence histogram relative to a trigger detection. The resulting structure preserves relative arrival-time correlations that are usually discarded and enables post-processed optimization of coincidence windows to trade off visibility against count rate. This method provides a general benchmark for continuous-wave sources in interference-based quantum network protocols.
ER -