Spontaneous four-wave mixing in liquid-core fibers: towards fibered Raman-free correlated photon sources

We experimentally demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, the generation of correlated photon pairs in a liquid-core photonic crystal fiber. Moreover, we show that, thanks to the specific Raman properties of liquids, the Raman noise (which is the main limitation of the performance of silica-core fiber-based correlated photon pair sources) is highly reduced. With a demonstrated coincident-to-accidental ratio equal to 63 and a pair generation efficiency of about 10−4 per pump pulse, this work contributes to the development of high-quality correlated photon pair sources for quantum communications.