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Published on: March 30, 2017
Biasing the quantum vacuum to control macroscopic probability distributions
Charles Roques-Carmes1, Yannick Salamin1,2, Jamison Sloan1
1Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Abstract:
Quantum field theory suggests that electromagnetic fields naturally fluctuate, and these fluctuations can be harnessed as a source of perfect randomness. Many potential applications of randomness rely on controllable probability distributions. We show that vacuum-level bias fields injected into multistable optical systems enable a controllable source of quantum randomness, and we demonstrated this concept in an optical parametric oscillator (OPO). By injecting bias pulses with less than one photon on average, we controlled the probabilities of the two possible OPO output states. The potential of our approach for sensing sub-photon-level fields was demonstrated by reconstructing the temporal shape of fields below the single-photon level. Our results provide a platform to study quantum dynamics in nonlinear driven-dissipative systems and point toward applications in probabilistic computing and weak field sensing.
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Bias
In statistics, a sampling bias is created when a sample is collected from a population, and some members of the population are not as likely to be chosen as others (remember, each member...

