Unscrambling entanglement through a complex medium

[N. H. Valencia, S. Goel, W. McCutcheon, H. Defienne and M. Malik, Nature Physics (2020)]

Quantum properties of light may enable unconditionally secure optical communications. In this respect, high-dimensional entangled states offer a way of exceeding the limitations of current approaches to quantum communication (e.g. larger information capacity and increased noise resilience). For example, the orbital angular momentum of photons was first used to establish high-dimensional quantum key distribution (HD-QKD) protocols in free-space, but with a limited range due to diffraction and the presence of atmospheric turbulence. Alternatively, multimode optical fibers (MMF) can be used to transport information encoded in parallel across many modes over large distances, and with limited losses. However, the complex mode mixing process occurring during light propagation through the fiber scrambles the encoded information, making it unusable by the receiver. In their work, N. H. Valencia and co-workers demonstrate the transport of six-dimensional spatial-mode entanglement through a 2m-long commercial MMF, by compensating the random mode mixing effect using a transmission matrix-based wavefront-shaping technique. Such an ability to certify the presence of high-dimensional entanglement between two parties (Alice and Bob) is an essential step towards the implementation of practical HD-QKD protocols in optical fibers.

Making useless (but beautiful) gifs with fiber modes

Social media like (too) short content like pictures or quotes, but above all, people love gifs (probably way too much). Publish a link to a few pages long post you wrote about a paper, a physical concept, or a piece of code, and a few people will like your tweet/post. Publish a gif, and the number of people you will reach will increase dramatically. Is it a good thing? Well, that depends on what you do with it. I try to use gifs to draw attention to more in-depth content that I hope some people will read. Let's make one together.

Endoscopy combining photoacoustic and fluorescence imaging with a small footprint

[S. Mezil et al., arxiv, 2006.10856 (2020)]

Achieving optical-resolution photoacoustic imaging can currently only be obtained using endoscopy. It usually implies a quite bulky endoscope and/or a low signal-to-noise detection. In this paper, the authors present a technique that combines wavefront shaping through a multimode fiber, to scan the focus spot, with a single-mode fiber-based ultrasound sensor to achieve a high signal-to-noise with a small footprint (250 by 125 microns).

Time reversed optical waves by arbitrary vector spatiotemporal field generation

Mickael Mounaix, Nicolas K. Fontaine, David T. Neilson, Roland Ryf, Haoshuo Chen, Juan Carlos Alvarado-Zacarias and Joel Carpenter

This video published on J. Carpenter Youtube Channel explained the details of the experiment of this paper [Mounaix et al., arxiv, 1909.07003, (2019)]. The authors use spatial and spectral shaping with a spatial light modulator to achieve spatio-temporal focusing of light by time-reversal through a multimode fiber.