Improvement of Hong-Ou-Mandel interference visibility by using a single-mode optical-fiber photon collector

We achieved 95% visibility in the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference experiment while we achieved only 56% visibility in a previous report. We used a 120 mW 405 nm single-mode continuous wave laser, a 5-mm-thick type-1 β-barium borate single crystal, standard Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer optics, two avalanche photodiode single-photon counters, and a homemade coincidence counting unit. The photon collection unit was the key difference between the present study and the previous study. In the present experiment, we used single-mode optical fibers for photon collection, which suppressed accidental coincidence between-different mode photons by acting as a spatial filter because of its core size being much smaller than a multi-mode fiber.