Cascaded cold atomic ensembles in a diamond configuration as a spectrally entangled multiphoton source

Abstract: We theoretically investigate the spectral entanglement of a multiphoton source generated from the cascade emissions in the cascaded cold atomic ensembles.\ This photon source is highly directional, guaranteed under the four-wave mixing condition, and is also highly frequency-correlated due to finite driving pulse durations and superradiant decay constants.\ We utilize Schmidt decomposition to study the bipartite entanglement of the biphoton states projected from the multiphoton ones.\ This entropy of entanglement can be manipulated by controlling the driving parameters and superradiant decay rates.\ Moreover the projected biphoton states in the cascaded scheme can have larger entanglement than the one produced from only one atomic ensemble, which results from larger capacity in multipartite entanglement.\ This cascaded scheme enables a multiphoton source useful in quantum information processing.\ It also allows for potential applications in multimode quantum communication and spectral shaping of high-dimensional continuous frequency entanglement.