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arXiv:1009.5645 · Physical Review A

Collective photon emission from symmetric states created with Rydberg atoms on a ring lattice

Beatriz Olmos, Igor Lesanovsky

Published Dec 8, 2010• 22 citations
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Abstract

We discuss the creation of nonclassical light from collective atomic states that are prepared in a ring-shaped lattice. These states are realized by exploiting the strong interaction between atoms in high-lying energy levels---the so-called Rydberg states---and yield a resource for creating excitations of the electromagnetic field that carry few photons. We characterize the properties of these photonic states showing that they are determined by the interplay among the ring geometry, the structure of the atomic resource states, and the collectivity in the photon emission which is controlled by the lattice spacing. The system permits the creation of versatile single-photon sources and two-photon entangled states.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.82.063404

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We discuss the creation of nonclassical light from collective atomic states that are prepared in a ring-shaped lattice. These states are realized by exploiting the strong interaction between atoms in high-lying energy levels---the so-called Rydberg states---and yield a resource for creating excitations of the electromagnetic field that carry few photons. We characterize the properties of these photonic states showing that they are determined by the interplay among the ring geometry, the structure of the atomic resource states, and the collectivity in the photon emission which is controlled by the lattice spacing. The system permits the creation of versatile single-photon sources and two-photon entangled states.
The creation of collective many-body quantum states from a two-dimensional lattice gas of atoms is studied. Our approach relies on the van der Waals interaction that is present between alkali metal atoms which are laser excited to high-lying Rydberg s-states. We focus on a regime in which the laser driving is strong compared to the interaction between Rydberg atoms. Here energetically low-lying many-particle states can be calculated approximately from a quadratic Hamiltonian. The potential usefulness of these states as a resource for the creation of deterministic single-photon sources is illustrated. The properties of these photon states are determined from the interplay between the particular geometry of the lattice and the interatomic spacing.
Abstract Quantum optics based on highly excited atoms, also known as Rydberg atoms, has cemented itself as a powerful platform for the manipulation of light at the few-photon level. The Rydberg blockade, resulting from the strong interaction between individual Rydberg atoms, can turn a large ensemble of atoms into a system which collectively resembles a single two-level emitter, a so-called Rydberg superatom. The coupling of this artificial emitter to a driving photonic mode is collectively enhanced by Rydberg interactions, enabling strong coherent coupling at the few-photon level in free-space. The exquisite level of control achievable through this has already demonstrated its utility in applications of quantum computing and information processing. Here, we review the derivation of the collective coupling between a Rydberg superatom and a single light mode and discuss the similarity of this free-space setup to waveguide quantum electrodynamics systems of quantum emitters coupled to photonic waveguides. We also briefly review applications of Rydberg superatoms to quantum optics such as single-photon generation and single-photon subtraction.
Atoms in highly excited Rydberg states exhibit remarkable properties such as large polarizability and strong interactions. This makes them interesting for a manifold of applications ranging from electric field sensors to carriers and mediators of quantum information and renders them into a powerful tool for studying quantum phenomena in strongly interacting many-particle systems. In this article we illuminate perspectives for the study of the relaxation and thermalization dynamics of closed many-body quantum systems using alkali atoms that are held in a ring lattice and excited to Rydberg states. Moreover, we show that Rydberg atoms confined to lattices offer exciting possibilities for the creation of entangled many-body quantum states which can serve as a resource for the generation of non-classical light.
Interacting Rydberg excitations in cold atomic ensembles can exhibit large quantum nonlinearities that enable engineering of strong interactions between individual photons. Consequently, Rydberg ensembles are a promising platform for quantum information applications and the study of more fundamental physics of few- and many-body phenomena with interacting photons. This thesis presents a series of experiments that study and exploit different regimes of Rydberg-mediated interactions. We report the realization of an efficient on-demand single-photon source. The strong long-range Rydberg interactions allow the excitation of only a single collective Rydberg state within the entire atomic medium. The collective excitation can be subsequently retrieved as a single-photon. We use this scheme to generate highly pure and highly indistinguishable photons, which are suitable for scalable quantum information applications. These photons can be compatible with other atomic systems due to their narrow bandwidth, which makes building practical hybrid quantum systems feasible. Here, we demonstrate high visibility two-photon quantum interference between our Rydberg-produced photons, and photons emitted by a remote single-trapped ion. We also study Rydberg atoms under electromagnetically induced transparency conditions, where coherent superpostions of photons and Rydberg excitations propagate through the atomic medium as lossless dark-state polaritons. In the experiment, we use the external control fields to tune the interactions to a many-body regime where we can observe resonant scattering of dark-state polaritons to lossy channels. We show that the enhanced scattering process arises as a pure three-body effect.
The realization of a Jaynes-Cummings model in the optical domain is proposed for an atomic ensemble. The scheme exploits the collective coupling of the atoms to a quantized cavity mode and the nonlinearity introduced by coupling to high-lying Rydberg states. A two-photon transition resonantly couples the single-atom ground state $|g\ensuremath{\rangle}$ to a Rydberg state $|e\ensuremath{\rangle}$ via a nonresonant intermediate state $|i\ensuremath{\rangle}$, but due to the interaction between Rydberg atoms only a single atom can be resonantly excited in the ensemble. This restricts the state space of the ensemble to the collective ground state $|G\ensuremath{\rangle}$ and the collectively excited state $|E\ensuremath{\rangle}$ with a single Rydberg excitation distributed evenly on all atoms. The collectively enhanced coupling of all atoms to the cavity field with coherent coupling strengths which are much larger than the decay rates in the system leads to the strong coupling regime of the resulting effective Jaynes-Cummings model. We use numerical simulations to show that the cavity transmission can be used to reveal detailed properties of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder of excited states and that the atomic nonlinearity gives rise to highly nontrivial photon emission from the cavity. Finally, we suggest that the absence of interactions between remote Rydberg atoms may, due to a combinatorial effect, induce a cavity-assisted excitation blockade whose range is larger than the typical Rydberg dipole-dipole interaction length.
We propose an efficient free-space scheme to create single photons in a well-defined spatiotemporal mode. To that end, we first prepare a single source atom in an excited Rydberg state. The source atom interacts with a large ensemble of ground-state atoms via a laser-mediated dipole-dipole exchange interaction. Using an adiabatic passage with a chirped laser pulse, we produce a spatially extended spin wave of a single Rydberg excitation in the ensemble, accompanied by the transition of the source atom to another Rydberg state. The collective atomic excitation can then be converted to a propagating optical photon via a coherent coupling field. In contrast to previous approaches, our single-photon source does not rely on the strong coupling of a single emitter to a resonant cavity, nor does it require the heralding of collective excitation or complete Rydberg blockade of multiple excitations in the atomic ensemble.