Neural Ordinary Differential Equations for Forecasting and Accelerating Photon Correlation Spectroscopy

J Phys Chem Lett. 2025 Jan 6:518-524. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.4c03234. Online ahead of print.

Abstract

Evaluating the quantum optical properties of solid-state single-photon emitters is a time-consuming task that typically requires interferometric photon correlation experiments. Photon correlation Fourier spectroscopy (PCFS) is one such technique that measures time-resolved single-emitter line shapes and offers additional spectral information over Hong-Ou-Mandel two-photon interference but requires long experimental acquisition times. Here, we demonstrate a neural ordinary differential equation model, g2NODE, that can forecast a complete and noise-free interferometry experiment from a small subset of noisy correlation functions. We demonstrate this for simulated and experimental data, where g2NODE utilizes 10-20 noisy measured photon correlation functions to create entire denoised interferograms of up to 200 stage positions, enabling up to a 20-fold speedup in experimental acquisition time from hours to minutes. Our work presents a new deep learning approach to greatly accelerate the use of photon correlation spectroscopy as an experimental characterization tool for novel quantum emitter materials.