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arXiv:1310.1212 · Physical Review A

Coherent propagation of a single photon in a lossless medium: 0 π pulse formation, storage, and retrieval in multiple temporal modes

Sh. Petrosyan, Yu. P. Malakyan

Published Dec 6, 2013• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Single-photon coherent optics represents a fundamental importance for the investigation of quantum light-matter interactions. While most work has considered the interaction in the steady-state regime, here we demonstrate that a single-photon pulse shorter than any relaxation time in a medium propagates without energy loss and is consistently transformed into a zero-area pulse. A general analytical solution is found for photon passage through a cold ensemble of $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$-type atoms confined inside a hollow core of a single-mode photonic-crystal fiber. We use the robust far-off-resonant Raman scheme to control the pulse reshaping by an intense control laser beam and show that in the case of cw control field, for exact two-photon resonance, the outgoing photon displays an oscillating temporal distribution, which is the quantum counterpart of a classical field ringing, while for nonzero two-photon detuning a slow photon is produced. We demonstrate also that a train of readout control pulses coherently recalls the stored photon in many well-separated temporal modes, thus producing time-bin entangled single-photon states. Such states, which allow sharing quantum information among many users, are highly demanded for applications in long-distance quantum communication.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.88.063817

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Single-photon coherent optics represents a fundamental importance for the investigation of quantum light-matter interactions. While most work has considered the interaction in the steady-state regime, here we demonstrate that a single-photon pulse shorter than any relaxation time in a medium propagates without energy loss and is consistently transformed into a zero-area pulse. A general analytical solution is found for photon passage through a cold ensemble of \ensuremathΛ\ensuremath{\Lambda}\ensuremathΛ-type atoms confined inside a hollow core of a single-mode photonic-crystal fiber. We use the robust far-off-resonant Raman scheme to control the pulse reshaping by an intense control laser beam and show that in the case of cw control field, for exact two-photon resonance, the outgoing photon displays an oscillating temporal distribution, which is the quantum counterpart of a classical field ringing, while for nonzero two-photon detuning a slow photon is produced. We demonstrate also that a train of readout control pulses coherently recalls the stored photon in many well-separated temporal modes, thus producing time-bin entangled single-photon states. Such states, which allow sharing quantum information among many users, are highly demanded for applications in long-distance quantum communication.
Time-bin entangled single-photons are highly demanded for long distance quantum communication. We propose a heralded source of tunable narrowband single photons entangled in well-separated multiple temporal modes (time bins) with controllable amplitudes. The detection of a single Stokes photon generated in a cold atomic ensemble via Raman scattering of a weak write pulse heralds the preparation of one spin excitation stored within the atomic medium. A train of read laser pulses deterministically converts the atomic excitation into a single anti-Stokes photon delocalized in multi-time-bins. The waveforms of bins are well-controlled by the read pulse parameters. A scheme to measure the phase coherence across all time bins is suggested.
A new method of preparing a single photon in temporally delocalized entangled modes is proposed and analyzed. We show that in a medium of four-level atoms with tripod-level configuration a strong parametric interaction between two one-photon pulses emerges, if the medium was initially prepared in a coherent superposition of the two ground states, while a strong classical field drives the neighbor transition from the third ground state. The analytical solution of Maxwell equations reveals that under the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), the quantum fields propagate with significantly small absorption and with different group velocities that leads to their temporal split into well-separated pulses, the amplitudes of which are well controlled by the driving field. The proposed scheme can serve as a robust source of narrow-band one-photon qubits with an entanglement between two temporal modes, not sensitive to losses in atmosphere and in telecommunication waveguides. We show also that in our scheme a controllable degree of temporal entanglement can be achieved.
Summary form only given. Strong interaction between two single photons [1], is a long standing and important goal in quantum photonics. This would enable a new regime of nonlinear optics and unlock several applications in quantum information science, including photon-photon gates and deterministic Bell-state measurements for quantum networking. In the context of quantum networks [2], a particularly important case is to achieve strong interaction between single photons from independent photon pairs that can be stored in quantum memories. So far, most of the efforts towards nonlinear effects at the single-photon level have been realized using weak classical input light.In this contribution, we demonstrate the storage and retrieval of a paired single photon emitted by an ensemble quantum memory in a strongly nonlinear medium based on highly excited Rydberg atomic excitations [3,4]. We demonstrate that non-classical correlations between the two photons persist after the retrieval from the Rydberg ensemble. We show that our Rydberg cold atomic ensemble displays optical nonlinearity with input pulses containing few tens of photons. Our results [5], mark an important step towards deterministic photonphoton interactions, and may enable deterministic Bell-state measurement with multimode quantum memories.
Time-bin encoding of photons offers a robust kind of long-distance quantum communication over lossy channels. The diversity of material nodes in quantum networks operating at natural frequencies requires coherent frequency and wave-form conversion of information-carrying photons to provide an efficient quantum interface with optical fibers and various quantum memories, which has been extensively studied. However, the quantum frequency conversion with transfer of time-bin encoding between single photons of different wavelengths has not yet been explored. In this paper, we present a method for efficiently exchanging time-bin encoding in the conversion process between two photons propagating in cold tripod atoms driven by a strong laser field. The latter is designed to slow down photons and suppress their absorption due to electromagnetically induced transparency. Photons interact parametrically through modified atomic coherence, which is utilized also to achieve equal group velocities of photons. We demonstrate the ability of our model to generate entanglement between distant atoms that equally share the original quantum information stored in the ground-state polarization qubits of both atoms. The proposed method for frequency conversion based on modified atomic coherence is promising because it can simplify the implementation of reliable and high-speed quantum communication protocols based on single-photon entanglement.
We report on the first observation of stationary light pulses and narrowband light storage inside a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber. Laser-cooled atoms were first loaded into the fiber core providing strong light-matter coupling. Light pulses were then stored in a collective atomic excitation using a single control laser beam. By applying a second counterpropagating control beam, a light pulse could be brought to a standstill. Our work paves the way towards the creation of strongly-correlated many-body systems with photons and applications in the field of quantum information processing.