Widely flexible and finely adjustable nonlocal dispersion cancellation with wavelength tuning

In fiber-based quantum information processing with energy-time entangled photon pairs, optimized dispersion compensation is vital to preserve the strong temporal correlation of the photon pairs. We propose and experimentally verify that, by simply tuning the wavelength of the entangled photon pairs, nonlocal dispersion cancellation (NDC) can provide a widely flexible and finely adjustable solution for optimizing the dispersion compensation, which cannot be reached with the traditional local dispersion cancellation (LDC) instead. By way of example, when a 50 km-long single-mode fiber (SMF) is dispersion compensated by a 6.2-km-long commercial dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) based on the LDC configuration, it will lead to an almost invariant over-compensation in the wavelength range of 1500-1600 nm which restricts the observed temporal coincidence width of the self-developed energy-time entangled photon-pairs source to a minimum of ∼110 ps. While in the NDC configuration, the dispersion compensation can be readily optimized by tuning the signal wavelength to 1565.7 nm and a minimum coincidence width of 86.1 ± 0.7 ps is observed, which is mainly limited by the jitter of the single-photon detection system. Furthermore, such optimized dispersion compensation can also be achieved as the fiber length varies from 48 km to 60 km demonstrating the wide flexibility of NDC. Thanks to these capabilities, elaborate dispersion compensation modules are no longer required, which makes NDC a more versatile tool in fiber-based quantum information and metrology applications.