Quantum physics of simple optical instruments

By Ulf Leonhardt. 2003

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Simple optical instruments are linear optical networks where the incident light modes are turned into equal numbers of outgoing modes by linear transformations. For example, such instruments are beam splitters, multiports, interferometers, fibre couplers, polarizers, gravitational lenses, parametric amplifiers, phase-conjugating mirrors and also black holes. The paper develops the quantum theory of simple optical instruments and applies the theory to a few characteristic situations, to the splitting and interference of photons and to the manifestation of Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen correlations in parametric downconversion. How to model irreversible devices such as absorbers and amplifiers is also shown. Finally, the paper develops the theory of Hawking radiation for a simple optical black hole. The paper is intended as a primer, as a nearly self-consistent tutorial. The reader should be familiar with basic quantum mechanics and statistics, and perhaps with optics and some elementary field theory. The quantum theory of light in dielectrics serves as the starting point and, in the concluding section, as a guide to understand quantum black holes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dad9805376d2850c77d92c0221d97a0d74b94315

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum interface between light and atomic ensembles (2008, methodology): “The Hamiltonian is formally identical to the parametric gain interaction Hamiltonian Leonhardt (2003) which has been a workhorse for 4 studies of entangled and non-classical states of light since the 1960s.”
Analogue Gravity (2005, background): “• Trans-Hawking versions of Hawking radiation, either as reformulations of the physics, or as alternative scenarios [30, 68, 130, 131, 150, 156, 167, 168, 169, 233, 289, 291, 325, 329, 333, 334, 340, 341, 350, 364].”
Linear optical quantum computing with photonic qubits (2005, methodology): “A good introduction to linear optical networks is given by Leonhardt (2003) and a determination of effective Hamiltonians is given by Leonhardt and Neumaier (2004).”