True Single-Photon Stimulated Four-Wave Mixing

Single-photon stimulated four-wave mixing (StFWM) is an important nonlinear optical phenomenon at the single-photon level. In this process, signal and idler photons are stimulated by seeded single photons when two pump photons are annihilated. The generated photons are correlated with each other, and more importantly, one of them is in the same mode with the seeded photons. Hence, StFWM has great potential to realize complex functions of photonic quantum information processing, such as quantum state manipulation and quantum cloning. In this paper, we provide the first experimental demonstration of single-photon StFWM in a piece of optical fiber. By using heralded single photons as the seeded photons, a true single-photon StFWM process is realized at the telecom band. It is confirmed by time-resolved four-photon coincidence measurement and variation of four-photon coincidence counts under different seed–pump delays. According to the experiment results, the potential performance of a quantum cloning machine...