We demonstrate sum-frequency generation between a telecom wavelength and the Rb D2 line, achieved through natural phase matching in a nonlinear whispering gallery mode resonator. Due to the strong optical field confinement and ultra high Q of the cavity, the process saturates already at sub-mW pump peak power, at least two orders of magnitude lower than in existing waveguide-based devices. The experimental data are in agreement with the nonlinear dynamics and phase matching theory based on spherical geometry. Our experimental and theoretical results point toward a new platform for manipulating the color and quantum states of light waves for applications such as atomic memory based quantum networking and logic operations with optical signals.
We demonstrate sum-frequency generation between a telecom wavelength and the Rb D2 line, achieved through natural phase matching in a nonlinear whispering gallery mode resonator. Due to the strong optical field confinement and ultra high Q of the cavity, the process saturates already at sub-mW pump peak power, at least two orders of magnitude lower than in existing waveguide-based devices. The experimental data are in agreement with the nonlinear dynamics and phase matching theory based on spherical geometry. Our experimental and theoretical results point toward a new platform for manipulating the color and quantum states of light waves for applications such as atomic memory based quantum networking and logic operations with optical signals.
We demonstrate for the first time natural phase matching for optical frequency doubling in a high-Q whispering-gallery-mode resonator made of lithium niobate. A conversion efficiency of 9% is achieved at 30 microW in-coupled continuous wave pump power. The observed saturation pump power of 3.2 mW is almost 2 orders of magnitude lower than the state-of-the-art value. This suggests an application of our frequency doubler as a source of nonclassical light requiring only a low-power pump, which easily can be quantum noise limited. Our theoretical analysis of the three-wave mixing in a whispering-gallery-mode resonator provides the relative conversion efficiencies for frequency doubling in various modes.
Quantum information is the next frontier in communications. to realize quantum communications, the quantum mechanical properties of today's best communication medium, light, must be harnessed in a scalable and efficient manner. Whispering-gallery mode resonators (WGMRs), a type of optical cavity, have advantages over traditional designs that can enhance processes used in the generation of nonclassical (quantum) states of light. In particular they reduce the power threshold for intensity-dependent nonlinear phenomena. One such process, second harmonic generation, can reduce the shot noise of light below the standard quantum limit. This dissertation explores the theoretical analysis and experimental tests of noise reduction through second harmonic generation in a crystalline whispering-gallery mode resonator. We also observe the generation of another nonlinear optical process, hyper-Raman scattering, at modest optical powers inside a crystalline WGMR. The change in optical properties of vanadium dioxide due to an optically-induced phase transition is also studied as a potential Q-switching material in a WGMR-type cavity.
Quantum Zeno blockade allows all-optical switching in a counterintuitive “interaction-free” manner. Using a lithium-niobate microdisk cavity nanofabricated on chip, we have observed phase matched sum-frequency generation and interaction-free switching between optical pulses in two tightly confined whispering-gallery modes. We have also verified that our device is suitable for nonlinear operations in a single-photon regime. Our results point to a scalable, chip-integrated platform for nonlinear optics extendable to the quantum regime.
In this paper, we reveal that some kinds of optical nonlinearities are further enhanced when incoherent light, instead of a laser, is used as a pump light. This idea was confirmed both theoretically and experimentally in the case of sum-frequency generation (SFG) using the optical second nonlinearity. The conversion efficiency of the SFG with incoherent light pumping increased as the bandwidth of the incoherent pump light decreased, finally reaching twice the conversion efficiency of conventional second harmonic generation (SHG) by laser pumping. This method dramatically relaxes the severe requirements of phase matching in the nonlinear optical process. The conversion efficiency became less sensitive to misalignment of the wavelength of pump light and also of device operation temperature when the bandwidth of the incoherent pump light was sufficiently broad, although the improvement of the conversion efficiency had an inverse relationship with the insensitivity to the phase-matching condition. The temperature tuning range was enhanced by more than two orders of magnitude in comparison with the conventional SHG method. As an example of a promising application of this new idea, we performed the generation of quantum entangled photon-pairs using cascaded optical nonlinearities (SFG and the subsequent spontaneous parametric down conversion) in a single periodically poled LiNbO3 waveguide device, in which the incoherent light was used as the pump source for both the parametric processes. We have achieved high fidelity exceeding 99% in quantum-state tomography experiments.
Efficient generation of harmonics in nonlinear optical resonators, particularly in whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) resonators, has led to successes such as parametric oscillators, narrow-band single-photon sources, and versatile frequency converters. A subtle problem, though, has strongly limited efficiency and hindered precise out-coupling of the generated light. Implementing their own prior theory and a polarization-selective birefringent coupling prism, the authors demonstrate an improvement of more than an order of magnitude in the amount of out-coupled light. The results are particularly interesting for applications in quantum optics relying on WGMs.
Over the last two decades, the emergence of quantum information science has uncovered many practical applications in areas such as communications, imaging, and sensing where harnessing quantum features of Nature provides tremendous benefits over existing methods exploiting classical physical phenomena. In this effort, one of the frontiers of research has been to identify and utilize quantum phenomena that are not susceptible to environmental and parasitic noise processes. Quantum photonics has been at the forefront of these studies because it allows room-temperature access to its inherently quantum-mechanical features, and allows leveraging the mature telecommunication industry. Accompanying the weak environmental influence, however, are also weak optical nonlinearities. Efficient nonlinear optical interactions are indispensible for many of the existing protocols for quantum optical computation and communication, e.g. high-fidelity entangling quantum logic gates rely on large nonlinear responses at the one- or few-photon-level. While this has been addressed to a great extent by interfacing photons with single quantum emitters and cold atomic gases, scalability has remained elusive. In this work, we identify the macroscopic second-order nonlinear polarization as a robust platform to address this challenge, and utilize the recent advances in the burgeoning field of optical microcavities to enhance this nonlinear response. In particular, we show theoretically that by using the quantum Zeno effect, low-noise, single-photon-level optical nonlinearities can be realized in lithium niobate whispering-gallery-mode microcavities, and present experimental progress toward this goal. Using the measured strength of the second-order nonlinear response in lithium niobate, we modeled the nonlinear system in the strong coupling regime using the Schrödinger picture framework and theoretically demonstrated that the single-photon-level operation can be observed for cavity lifetimes in excess of 500 ns for all the three waves in the interaction, provided a cavity of radius R < 10 μm is fabricated. Experimentally, we showed that the absorption-limited quality ( Q) factors for lithium niobate, Qintrinsic ≈ 108, can be achieved using diamond-turning methods for disk radii, R > 100 μm, whereas for the smaller disks, additional rigorous polishing may be required. We also fabricated resonators as small as R ∼ 40 μm via this method. In a millimeter-sized resonator, we experimentally demonstrated triply resonant sum-frequency generation, which allowed for an observation of the classical manifestation of the quantum Zeno effect, wherein line-splitting occurs due to the high efficiency intracavity frequency conversion. For the sub-100 μm resonators, we present phase-matching calculations and dispersion-management techniques using analytical approximations and rigorous finite-element-method simulations. Experimentally, Q -factor measurements are shown, and we identify the specific short-comings of the fabrication procedure that may have led to the lower, surface-roughness-limited Q-factors. Finally, we identify pathways toward achieving the single-photon-level nonlinear optics using off-resonant nonlinear optics, which requires the simultaneous realization of phase-matching, large cavity lifetimes, and small mode volumes. We believe this would be feasible in the near future as more advanced fabrication and processing methods are developed for crystalline materials and novel nonlinear crystals are synthesized.