Spectral correlation measurements at the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference dip

We present an efficient tool capable of measuring the spectral correlations between photons emerging from a Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer. We show that for our spectrally factorizable spontaneous down-conversion source, the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference visibility decreases as the photons’ frequency spread is increased to a maximum of 165 nm. Unfiltered, we obtained a visibility of 92.0% ± 0.2%. The maximum visibility was 97% ± 0.2% after applying filtering. We show that the tool can be useful for the study of spectral correlations that impair high-visibility and high-fidelity multisource interference applications. The nature of this tool also allows for arbitrary post-selective spectral filtering and high-rate multiphoton spectral correlation measurements.