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Noise-immune quantum correlations of intense light

Nature Photonics volume 19, pages 751–757 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Lasers with high intensity generally exhibit strong intensity fluctuations far above the shot-noise level. Taming this noise is pivotal to a wide range of applications, both classical and quantum. Here we demonstrate the creation of intense light with quantum levels of noise even when starting from inputs with large amounts of excess noise. In particular, we demonstrate how intense squeezed light with intensities approaching 0.1 TW cm−2, but noise at or below the shot-noise level, can be produced from noisy inputs associated with high-power amplified laser sources (an overall noise reduction of 30-fold). On the basis of a new theory of quantum noise in multimode systems, we show that the ability to generate quantum light from noisy inputs results from multimode quantum correlations, which maximally decouple the output light from the dominant noise channels in the input light. As an example, we demonstrate this effect for femtosecond pulses in nonlinear fibres, but the noise-immune correlations that enable our results are generic to many other nonlinear systems in optics and beyond.

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Fig. 1: High-intensity sources of light with quantum levels of noise.
Fig. 2: Generating intense squeezed light from noisy amplified sources.
Fig. 3: Noise statistics of nonlinear filtering.
Fig. 4: Noise immunity owing to multimode quantum correlations.
Fig. 5: Noise immunity for pairs of colours induced by quantum correlations.

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Data availability

The data used to generate the plots in Figs. 2, 3 and 5 are available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28664672. All data that support the other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The scripts used to implement the model used in this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge useful discussions with E. Ippen, L. Wright, R. Yanagimoto, T. Onodera and F. Wise. N.R. acknowledges the support of a Junior Fellowship from the Harvard Society of Fellows as well as funding from the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University. Y.S. acknowledges the support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through the Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship number P2EZP2-188091. J.S. acknowledges the previous support of a Mathworks Fellowship, as well as previous support from a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship (F-1730184536). This material is based on work also supported in part by the US Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT, under Collaborative Agreement Number W911NF-23-2-0121. We also acknowledge the support of P. Tayebati. This publication was also supported in part by the DARPA Agreement number HO0011249049.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Shiekh Zia Uddin, Nicholas Rivera.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Shiekh Zia Uddin, Nicholas Rivera, Yannick Salamin & Marin Soljačić

  2. Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Shiekh Zia Uddin, Devin Seyler, Jamison Sloan, Yannick Salamin, Charles Roques-Carmes & Marin Soljačić

  3. Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Nicholas Rivera

  4. School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Nicholas Rivera

  5. CREOL, The College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    Yannick Salamin

  6. E. L. Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Charles Roques-Carmes

  7. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and BU Photonics Center, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Shutao Xu & Michelle Y. Sander

  8. Division of Materials Science and Engineering, Boston University, Brookline, MA, USA

    Michelle Y. Sander

  9. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Michelle Y. Sander

  10. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Ido Kaminer

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Contributions

N.R. developed the theoretical framework and models used to analyse the data, with contributions from S.Z.U. and J.S. N.R. and S.Z.U. analysed the data. S.Z.U. led the construction of the experimental set-up and the data collection with contributions from D.S., Y.S., J.S., S.X. and N.R. The concept of noise immunity was conceived by N.R. and developed in discussions with S.Z.U., I.K. and M.S. The paper was written by N.R. with input from S.Z.U., D.S., J.S., Y.S., S.X., C.R.-C., M.Y.S., I.K. and M.S. All authors contributed to the reading and revision of the paper.

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Correspondence to Nicholas Rivera.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–5 and Discussion Sections 1–3.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 2

Contains workbook with csv files for all x and y data for all lines and scatter plots in the figure representing measured or computed data.

Source Data Fig. 3

Contains workbook with csv files for all x and y data for all lines and scatter plots in the figure representing measured or computed data. Also contains colour data for relevant colour maps.

Source Data Fig. 5

Contains workbook with csv files for all x and y data for all lines and scatter plots in the figure representing measured or computed data. Also contains colour data for relevant colour maps.

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Zia Uddin, S., Rivera, N., Seyler, D. et al. Noise-immune quantum correlations of intense light. Nat. Photon. 19, 751–757 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-025-01677-2

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