Capturing the spectrotemporal structure of a biphoton wave packet with delay-line-anode single-photon imagers

Abstract: Distinguishing photon-arrival time and position is crucial for advancing quantum technology. However, capturing spatial and temporal information efficiently remains challenging. Here, we present a novel photon-detection technique to achieve a significantly more efficient measurement of frequency-entangled biphoton than conventional photon detectors. We utilize a delay-line-anode single-photon detector (DLD), which consists of a position-sensitive delay line anode sensor behind a microchannel plate. Biphotons are obtained from the decay of biexcitons in the copper chloride semiconductor crystal. Two DLDs are coupled with a grating spectrometer exit to measure the joint spectral distributions of the biphoton. The resulting non-scanning process requires only a few minutes to obtain a temporally and spectrally resolved image, which is much quicker than the conventional biphoton frequency measurement. Our technique paves the way for all experiments in multi-mode quantum science requiring coincidence measurement.