Raman-Free, Noble-Gas-Filled Photonic-Crystal Fiber Source for Ultrafast, Very Bright Twin-Beam Squeezed Vacuum

We report a novel source of twin beams based on modulational instability in high-pressure argon-filled hollow-core kagome-style photonic-crystal fiber. The source is Raman-free and manifests strong photon-number correlations for femtosecond pulses of squeezed vacuum with a record brightness of ∼2500 photons per mode. The ultra-broadband (∼50  THz) twin beams are frequency tunable and contain one spatial and less than 5 frequency modes. The presented source outperforms all previously reported squeezed-vacuum twin-beam sources in terms of brightness and low mode content.