  Multi-photon interference is at the heart of the recently proposed linear
optical quantum computing scheme and plays an essential role in many protocols
in quantum information. Indistinguishability is what leads to the effect of
quantum interference. Optical interferometers such as Michaelson interferometer
provide a measure for second-order coherence at one-photon level and
Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer was widely employed to describe two-photon
entanglement and indistinguishability. However, there is not an effective way
for a system of more than two photons. Recently, a new interferometric scheme
was proposed to quantify the degree of multi-photon distinguishability. Here we
report an experiment to implement the scheme for three-photon case. We are able
to generate three photons with different degrees of temporal distinguishability
and demonstrate how to characterize them by the visibility of three-photon
interference. This method of quantitative description of multi-photon
indistinguishability will have practical implications in the implementation of
quantum information protocols.
