Research lines

The inslight group research activity includes some important topics of light-matter interaction, such as nonlinear optics, quantum optics, quantum information and characterization of different classes of photodetectors. The activity is essentially experimental, but it is well supported by several collaborations with national and international theoretical groups.
The research has been performed on the following topics:

• Study of the holographic properties of the second-order nonlinear interactions for the production of real-time holograms in one and two dimensions.
• Generation and characterization in the classical regime of two interlinked second-order nonlinear interactions. Application to the development of logic gates.
• Study, production and characterization of intense bipartite and tripartite entangled states in the pulsed domain and in different intensity regimes: in the macroscopic one with pin photodiodes, either amplified or not, in the mesocopic one with hybrid photodetectors with partial photon-counting capability, in the microscopic one with single-photon detectors.
• Reconstruction of the photon-number statistics, the shot-by-shot photon-number correlation and the Wigner function of classical states in the mesoscopic regime by means of different methods of analysis ( self-consistent and ON/OFF procedures).
• Use and characterization of different classes of photodetectors (photomultipliers, hybrid photodetectors, Si-photomultipliers, EMCCD cameras, iCCD cameras) to measure pulsed states of light.
• Realization of imaging protocols (image transfer, ghost imaging) with CCD and EMCCD cameras.
• Generation of conditional states by means of multiple photon-subtraction with photon-number resolving detectors on classically and quantum correlated bipartite states.
• Generation and characterization of non-Gaussian states; comparison between different non-Gaussianity measures for quantum information protocols.
• Investigation of sub-Poissonian and non-Gaussian character of conditional states obtained by multimode twin-beam states in the mesoscopic photon-number domain.
• Study of high-order photon-number correlations and applications to the discrimination between classical and quantum states of light.
• Generation and characterization of phase-averaged coherent states to be used as decoy states in quantum key distribution protocols.
• Phase estimation in communication protocols with coherent states in the presence of phase noise.
• Investigation of the spatio-spectral coherence properties of twin-beam states of light at different intensity regimes, including pump depletion.
• Study of the statistical properties and of the quantum nature of light generated by means of second-harmonic generation and up-conversion process applied to a multimode twin-beam state.