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arXiv:1109.4099 · Physical Review A

Quantum correlations and violation of the Bell inequality induced by an external field in a two-photon radiative cascade

Luqi Yuan, Sumanta Das

Published Jun 17, 2011• 2 citations

Abstract

We study the polarization-dependent second-order correlation of a pair of photons emitted in a four-level radiative cascade driven by an external field. It is found that the quantum correlations of the emitted photons, degraded by the energy splitting of the intermediate levels in the radiative cascade, can be efficiently revived by a far-detuned external field. The physics of this revival is linked to an induced Stark shift and the formation of dressed states in the system by the nonresonant external field. Furthermore, we investigated the competition between the effect of the coherent external field and incoherent dephasing of the intermediate levels. We find that the degradation of quantum correlations due to the incoherent dephasing can be contained for small dephasing with the external field. We also studied the nonlocality of the correlations by evaluating the Bell inequality in the linear polarization basis for the radiative cascade. We find that the Bell parameter decreases rapidly with increase in the intermediate-level energy splitting or incoherent dephasing rate to the extent that there is no violation. However, the presence of an external field leads to control over the degrading mechanisms and preservation of nonlocal correlation among the photons. This in turn can induce a violation of Bell's inequality in the radiative cascade for arbitrary intermediate-level splitting and small incoherent dephasing.

DOI: 10.1103/physreva.83.063819

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It is theoretically and experimentally shown that photons emitted by statistically independent incoherent classical light sources and measured in the far field in spatially separated modes may display spatial correlations akin to path-entanglement of photons produced by quantum sources. By measuring higher order photon-correlations at different locations, i.e.,

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m \geq 6

a violation of Bell-type inequalities for spatial degrees of freedom. The spatial correlations among the photons can be understood from state projection where the detection of the first

m

photons projects the sources onto a state which emits the subsequent photon in a strongly correlated manner. From this perspective the entanglement and violation of Bell's inequalities appears as a consequence of nonvanishing cross correlations between noncommuting quadrature phase components of the two spatially separated fields after

m

photons have been recorded. In this way we show that classical systems may produce spatial field correlations violating local realistic theories.

We investigate two-color photon correlations in the light emitted by two strongly driven, strongly interacting two-level emitters. The correlations are interpreted introducing the collective dressed states picture, which allows us to describe both bunching and antibunching based on the allowed and prohibited transitions. At odds from weakly interacting emitters, the strong interaction lifts the degeneracy of the energy differences between the different states, leading to a temporal breaking of symmetry for the correlations: photons of different frequencies may not be emitted in any order. Finally, we show that most of the virtual processes, which involve pairs of photons, yield nonclassical correlations when the sum of their energies fits any of the interaction-induced sidebands in the emitted spectrum. In particular, depending on the frequency of the emitted photons, correlations strong enough to violate Bell inequalities can appear.

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