Quantum limits for cascaded optical parametric amplifiers

Abstract

We demonstrate the enhanced quantum noise reduction of the output field from an optical parametric amplifier (OPA) by employing the cascaded optical parametric amplifiers (COPA), in which the output field of one OPA is the input field of the subsequent one. The output field noise formulas of the cascaded degenerate and nondegenerate OPAs (CDOPA and CNOPA) are obtained. The analytical results show that a CDOPA and a CNOPA can generate squeezing beams and entangled beams with a wider bandwidth under a low pump parameter, respectively. The cavity output efficiency and the intracavity loss are the main factors for improving the degrees of squeezing and entanglement. Our work will provide improved schemes for designing COPAs to efficiently produce high-quality squeezed and entangled states, which have potential applications in quantum-information processing.