Yin Xia, Zhang Licheng
J Opt Soc Am A Opt Image Sci Vis. 2016 Jul 1;33(7):1348-52. doi: 10.1364/JOSAA.33.001348.
Polarization of light has many applications in quantum information processing, including quantum teleportation and dense coding. In this paper, we investigate the polarization fluctuations of Airy beams propagating in a slant turbulent channel under the "few-photon" limit. Using the quantum Stokes parameters and the quantum degree of polarization, we demonstrate that the degree of polarization of Airy beams increases significantly with the large number of the detection photons, and a higher photon-number level can retain the stability of polarization. Numerical simulations show that the longer propagation distance and the stronger turbulence will lead to less oscillatory behaviors and a decrease in the polarization degree of Airy beams, but a bigger exponential truncation factor will cause an increase in the polarization degree of Airy beams. In contrast with Gaussian beams, the degree of polarization of Airy beams is less affected by atmospheric turbulence and propagation distance under the same conditions, which means that Airy beams possess a resilient ability against turbulence-induced perturbations. These results indicate that Airy beams have great potential for applications in long-distance free-space optical communications to improve the performance of a polarization-encoded free-space quantum communication system.
光的偏振在量子信息处理中有许多应用，包括量子隐形传态和密集编码。在本文中，我们研究了在“少光子”极限下，艾里光束在倾斜湍流信道中传播时的偏振涨落。利用量子斯托克斯参量和量子偏振度，我们证明了艾里光束的偏振度随着探测光子数的大量增加而显著增大，并且更高的光子数水平能够保持偏振的稳定性。数值模拟表明，传播距离越长、湍流越强，艾里光束的振荡行为越少，偏振度降低；但指数截断因子越大，艾里光束的偏振度增加。与高斯光束相比，在相同条件下，艾里光束的偏振度受大气湍流和传播距离的影响较小，这意味着艾里光束具有抵抗湍流引起的扰动的弹性能力。这些结果表明，艾里光束在长距离自由空间光通信中具有巨大的应用潜力，可用于提高偏振编码自由空间量子通信系统的性能。
