Abstract:

The Hong-Ou-Mandel effect is a well-known two-photon interference phenomena in quantum optics. Traditional quantum optics experiments are limited to the optical regime by nature of their sources. We propose a method to extend the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect to the hard x-ray regime with the use of a high-brightness synchrotron source (APS-U). This would enable the production of entangled biphotons at much higher rates than would currently be possible through traditional parametric down-conversion methods and allow quantum optics techniques to be extended to established x-ray facilities. We outline the construction of a brightness-preserving x-ray interferometer capable of identifying biphoton states along with initial testing and calibration and propose a detection scheme to identify x-ray biphotons produced through Hong-Ou-Mandel interference.