- Physical Review Journals
All JournalsPhysics Magazine

Physical Review Research

Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Open Access

Accurate and precise optical phase sensor based on a nonlinear quantum Sagnac interferometer

Romain Dalidet, Laurent Labonté*, Gregory Sauder, Sébastien Tanzilli, and Anthony Martin

  • *Contact author: laurent.labonte@univ-cotedazur.fr
PDF

Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033175 – Published 21 August, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/y1pg-nx49

Abstract

Optical phase measurements play a key role in the detection of macroscopic parameters such as position, velocity, and displacement. They also permit to qualify the microscopic properties of photonic waveguides such as polarization mode dispersion, refractive index difference, and chromatic dispersion. In the quest for ever-better measurement performance and relevance, we report a quantum nonlinear interferometer based on a Sagnac configuration allowing precise, accurate, self-stabilized, and reproductible optical phase measurement. The potential of this system is demonstrated through the measurement of second-order dispersion, namely, chromatic dispersion of a commercial dispersion-shifted fiber at telecommunication wavelength. We demonstrate a precision of 0.007%, surpassing state-of-the-art measurements by more than one order of magnitude. Additionally, the accuracy of the second-order dispersion value is determined through the measurement of the third-order dispersion, showing a quadratic error as low as 5%. Our system promises the development of photonic-based sensors enabling the measurements of optical-material properties in a user-friendly manner.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

References (27)

  1. S. Daryanoosh, S. Slussarenko, D. Berry, H. Wiseman, and G. Pryde, Experimental optical phase measurement approaching the exact Heisenberg limit, Nat. Commun. 9, 4606 (2018).
  2. W. Jia et al., Squeezing the quantum noise of a gravitational-wave detector below the standard quantum limit, Science 385, 1318 (2024).
  3. B. Ndagano, H. Defienne, D. Branford, Y. Shah, A. Lyons, N. Westerberg, E. Gauger, and D. Faccio, Quantum microscopy based on Hong–Ou–Mandel interference, Nat. Photon. 16, 384 (2022).
  4. A. Abouraddy, M. Nasr, B. Saleh, A. Sergienko, and M. Teich, Quantum-optical coherence tomography with dispersion cancellation, Phys. Rev. A 65, 053817 (2002).
  5. V. Giovannetti, S. Lloyd, and L. Maccone, Quantum-enhanced measurements: Beating the standard quantum limit, Science 306, 1330 (2004).
  6. P. Moreau, J. Sabines-Chesterking, R. Whittaker, S. Joshi, P. Birchall, A. McMillan, J. Rarity, and J. Matthews, Demonstrating an absolute quantum advantage in direct absorption measurement, Sci. Rep. 7, 6256 (2017).
  7. M. Genovese, Experimental quantum enhanced optical interferometry, AVS Quantum Sci. 3, 044702 (2021).
  8. D. Grassani, M. Galli, and D. Bajoni, Active stabilization of a Michelson interferometer at an arbitrary phase with subnanometer resolution, Opt. Lett. 39, 2530 (2014).
  9. B. Culshaw, The optical fibre Sagnac interferometer: An overview of its principles and applications, Meas. Sci. Technol. 17, R1 (2006).
  10. M. Fink, F. Steinlechner, J. Handsteiner, J. Dowling, T. Scheidl, and R. Ursin, Entanglement-enhanced optical gyroscope, New J. Phys. 21, 053010 (2019).
  11. G. P. Agrawal, Nonlinear Fiber Optics, 5th ed. (Academic Press/Elsevier, 2013).
  12. S. Fasel, N. Gisin, G. Ribordy, and H. Zbinden, Quantum key distribution over 30 km of standard fiber using energy-time entangled photon pairs: A comparison of two chromatic dispersion reduction methods, Eur. Phys. J. D 30, 143 (2004).
  13. B. Shi and A. Tomita, Generation of a pulsed polarization entangled photon pair using a Sagnac interferometer, Phys. Rev. A 69, 013803 (2004).
  14. F. Kaiser, P. Vergyris, D. Aktas, C. Babin, L. Labonté, and S. Tanzilli, Quantum enhancement of accuracy and precision in optical interferometry, Light: Sci. Appl. 7, 17163 (2018).
  15. R. Dalidet, A. Martin, M. Riesner, S. Ahmedou, R. Dauliat, B. Leconte, G. Walter, G. Sauder, J. Delagnes, G. Millot, P. Roy, R. Jamier, S. Tanzilli, and L. Labonté, Plug-and-play measurement of chromatic dispersion by means of two-photon interferometry, Phys. Rev. Appl. 20, 024026 (2023).
  16. J. Franson, Nonlocal cancellation of dispersion, Phys. Rev. A 45, 3126 (1992).
  17. T. Grósz, A. Kovács, M. Kiss, and R. Szipőcs, Measurement of higher order chromatic dispersion in a photonic bandgap fiber: Comparative study of spectral interferometric methods, Appl. Opt. 53, 1929 (2014).
  18. J. Franson, Bell inequality for position and time, Phys. Rev. Lett. 62, 2205 (1989).
  19. D. Oser, S. Tanzilli, F. Mazeas, C. Alonso-Ramos, X. Le Roux, G. Sauder, X. Hua, O. Alibart, L. Vivien, É. Cassan, and L. Labonté, High-quality photonic entanglement out of a stand-alone silicon chip, npj Quantum Inf. 6, 31 (2020).
  20. C. Baker, Y. Lu, and X. Bao, Chromatic-dispersion measurement by modulation phase-shift method using a Kerr phase-interrogator, Opt. Express 22, 22314 (2014).
  21. V. Pagé and L. Chen, Measuring chromatic dispersion of optical fiber using time-of-flight and a tunable multi-wavelength semiconductor fiber laser, Opt. Commun. 265, 161 (2006).
  22. W. Bogaerts, P. De Heyn, T. Van Vaerenbergh, K. De Vos, S. Kumar Selvaraja, T. Claes, P. Dumon, P. Bienstman, D. Van Thourhout, and R. Baets, Silicon microring resonators, Laser Photon. Rev. 6, 47 (2012).
  23. M. Cabrejo-Ponce, C. Spiess, A. M. Muniz, P. Ancsin, and F. Steinlechner, GHz-pulsed source of entangled photons for reconfigurable quantum networks, Quantum Sci. Technol. 7, 045022 (2022).
  24. Y. Repelin, E. Husson, F. Bennani, and C. Proust, Raman spectroscopy of lithium niobate and lithium tantalate. Force field calculations, J. Phys. Chem. Solids 60, 819 (1999).
  25. P. Eraerds, N. Walenta, M. Legré, N. Gisin, and H. Zbinden, Quantum key distribution and 1 Gbps data encryption over a single fibre, New J. Phys. 12, 063027 (2010).
  26. Thorlabs, Polarization-maintaining dispersion-compensating fiber optic patch cables (2023), https://www.thorlabs.com/thorproduct.cfm?partnumber=PMDCFA5.
  27. D. B. Leviton and B. J. Frey, Temperature-dependent absolute refractive index measurements of synthetic fused silica, Proc. SPIE 6273, 62732K (2006).

Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033175– Published 21 August, 2025
  • Received 19 December 2024
  • Revised 7 March 2025
  • Accepted 11 July 2025
Crossmark - Check for updates button
Creative Commons Logo

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation