Broadband quantum light on a fiber-optic platform: from biphotons and heralded single photons to bright squeezed vacuum

Four-wave mixing (FWM) of ultrashort laser pulses in a highly nonlinear photonic-crystal fiber is shown to provide a multimodal source of broadband quantum states of light. In the regime of low pump powers, generation of two-photon states and heralded single photons with a bandwidth up to  ≈6 THz is demonstrated within an FWM-sideband tunability range of  ≈55 THz. In the modality of heralded single-photon generation, three-detector measurements of the conditional second-order correlation function reveal a strong antibunching in the signal-photon channel, with more than 99.2% of the signal counts identified as truly single-photon states. At high pump powers, two-detector signal-idler correlation function measurements indicate broadband bright squeezed vacuum generation. (letter)