Coherent ultrafast measurement of time-bin encoded photons

Abstract: Time-bin encoding is a robust form of optical quantum information, especially for transmission in optical fibers. To read out the information, the separation of the time bins must be larger than the detector time resolution, typically on the order of nanoseconds for photon counters. In the present work, we demonstrate a technique using a nonlinear interaction between chirped entangled time-bin photons and shaped laser pulses to perform projective measurements on arbitrary time-bin states with picosecond-scale separations. We demonstrate a tomographically-complete set of time-bin qubit projective measurements and show the fidelity of operations is sufficiently high to violate the CHSH-Bell inequality by more than 6 standard deviations.