Non-local geometric phase in two-photon interferometry

Anthony Martin, Olivier Alibart, Jean-Christoph Flesch, Joseph Samuel, Supurna Sinha, Sébastien Tanzilli, Anders Kastberg

Published 2011-10-03, updated 2012-01-05Version 2

We report the experimental observation of the nonlocal geometric phase in Hanbury Brown-Twiss polarized intensity interferometry. The experiment involves two independent, polar- ized, incoherent sources, illuminating two polarized detectors. Varying the relative polarization angle between the detectors introduces a geometric phase equal to half the solid angle on the Poincar\'e sphere traced out by a pair of single photons. Local measurements at either detector do not reveal the effect of the geometric phase, which appears only in the coincidence counts between the two detectors, showing a genuinely nonlocal effect. We show experimentally that coincidence rates of photon arrival times at separated detectors can be controlled by the two photon geometric phase. This effect can be used for manipulating and controlling photonic entanglement.