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arXiv:1511.00559 · Physical Review Letters

Partially Nondestructive Continuous Detection of Individual Traveling Optical Photons

Mahdi Hosseini, Kristin M. Beck, Yiheng Duan, Wenlan Chen, Vladan Vuletić

Published Jan 19, 2016• 18 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We report the continuous and partially nondestructive measurement of optical photons. For a weak light pulse traveling through a slow-light optical medium (signal), the associated atomic-excitation component is detected by another light beam (probe) with the aid of an optical cavity. We observe strong correlations of g_{sp}^{(2)}=4.4(5) between the transmitted signal and probe photons. The observed (intrinsic) conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency ranges between 13% and 1% (65% and 5%) for a signal transmission range of 2% to 35%, at a typical time resolution of 2.5 μs. The maximal observed (intrinsic) device nondestructive quantum efficiency, defined as the product of the conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency and the signal transmission, is 0.5% (2.4%). The normalized cross-correlation function violates the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, confirming the nonclassical character of the correlations.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.116.033602

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We report the continuous and partially nondestructive measurement of optical photons. For a weak light pulse traveling through a slow-light optical medium (signal), the associated atomic-excitation component is detected by another light beam (probe) with the aid of an optical cavity. We observe strong correlations of g_{sp}^{(2)}=4.4(5) between the transmitted signal and probe photons. The observed (intrinsic) conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency ranges between 13% and 1% (65% and 5%) for a signal transmission range of 2% to 35%, at a typical time resolution of 2.5 μs. The maximal observed (intrinsic) device nondestructive quantum efficiency, defined as the product of the conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency and the signal transmission, is 0.5% (2.4%). The normalized cross-correlation function violates the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, confirming the nonclassical character of the correlations.
Deterministic photon-photon interactions are a long-standing goal in optical science. Using an atomic ensemble inside a cavity, we demonstrate the mutual cross modulation of two continuous light beams at the level of individual photons. The originally uncorrelated beams derived from independent lasers become anticorrelated, as evidenced by an equal-time cross-correlation function g^{(2)}=0.89(1), showing that one photon in one beam extinguishes a photon in the other beam with a probability of 11(1)%. With further technical improvements, our approach should enable the nondestructive continuous detection of traveling optical photons.
Detecting a single photon without absorbing it is a long-standing challenge in quantum optics. All experiments demonstrating the nondestructive detection of a photon make use of a high quality cavity. We present a cavity-free scheme for nondestructive single-photon detection. By pumping a nonlinear medium we implement an interfield Rabi oscillation which leads to a ∼π phase shift on a weak probe coherent laser field in the presence of a single signal photon without destroying the signal photon. Our cavity-free scheme operates with a fast intrinsic time scale in comparison with similar cavity-based schemes. We implement a full real-space multimode numerical analysis of the interacting photonic modes and confirm the validity of our nondestructive scheme in the multimode case.
Destructive interference-based photon-phonon antibunching can lead to violations of classical inequalities in optomechanical cavity systems. In this paper, we explore the violation of the classical Cauchy-Schwarz inequality by examining second-order auto-correlation and cross-correlation functions, as well as Bell's nonlocality, to analyze the quantum correlations of single photon-phonon excitations when the system is driven by two weak probe fields. We propose that the violation of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality can serve as an indicator for the stronger nonclassical tests associated with Bell's theorem. Our system reveals strong quantum correlations of photon-phonon pairs with distinctive antidiagonal patterns of photon filtering. For numerical analysis, we consider a weak effective optomechanical coupling strength and various optical-to-mechanical field amplitude ratios that enable unconventional photon (phonon) blockades at resonance. The findings are significant for producing sub-Poissonian signals under optimal conditions and have potential applications in hybrid systems for generating on-demand single photon-phonon pairs.