Two port interferometer

All two-port interferometers have the universal intensity output given by... 

Fig. 11.2 Universal response curve for a two port interferometer as a function of phase offset. The positions of quadrature occur at the points of largest slopes where phase to intensity transduction is largest...

The universal interferometric response of a balanced two-port interferometer is shown in Fig. 11.2 as a function of the fixed phase offset between the two waves. The maximum slope of the intensity curve occurs when the fixed phase offset between the waves is an odd integer of = re/2. These conditions of maximum slope are called the conditions of phase quadrature. There are two quadrature conditions per cycle, with opposite slopes and hence opposite signed responses to modulated phase. These are the positions of maximum phase-to-intensity transduction and are the operating points for interferometric detection of protein or DNA on spinning discs. 

Let us stress that the operational definition of the quantum phase of radiation [47] is also based on the use of bilinear forms in the photon operators. In the simplest form, the idea of the operational approach to the phase difference can be illustrated with the aid of the two-port interferometer shown in Fig. 11 (see Refs. 14 and 47 for more detailed discussion). The two incident monochromatic (or quasimonochromatic) light beams are combined by a symmetric beamsplitter oriented at 45° to each beam. The resultant intensities emerging from each output port are measured by the two photodetectors connected with a comparator (computer) as in the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss interferometer [85] (also see Refs. 14, 15, and 86). Following Noh et al. [47], we denote by a and 2 the photon annihilation operators, describing the field at the two input ports, and by a and 04 the corresponding operators at the two output ports. Then... 

As shown in Fig. 10, two sources, one a common source and the other consisting of 0 waves, feed the input ports of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The intensity predicted by the usual theory for the two output ports results only from the input source S, and is given by... 

---