Photon number statistics of entanglement generated by multiple single photon sources

Multiphoton interference results in a wide variety of non-classical photon number statistics, including characteristic signatures of entanglement between two or more sets of optical modes. Here, we consider the photon number statistics observed after applying discrete Fourier transformations (DFTs) to bipartite entangled states generated using single photon sources and beam splitters. It is shown that the output photon number states of DFTs are eigenstates of a translational mode shifting operator in the input. The complex eigenvalues of the mode shift can be identified by a phase number K obtained from the output photon distribution. For each output distribution, the possible input states are limited to mode shift eigenstates with the same K-value. Using this mode shift rule, we can identify the quantum coherence between different photon number distributions in the input with experimentally observable K-values in the output of the DFT. In the case of multi-photon entanglement obtained by post-selection and beam splitting single photons, this coherence is non-local, resulting in correlated pairs of K-values that always sum up to zero. We can therefore observe both the correlations between the input photon number distributions and a complementary correlation between the output photon numbers of two DFTs to obtain a reliable characterization of the entanglement between the two multi-mode multi-photon systems. Importantly, the K-value allows a classification of large sets of possible photon number distributions, resulting in a significant simplification of the experimental evaluation of the multi-photon output statistics and opening up the road towards more efficient applications of non-classical multi-photon states.