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arXiv:1711.11490 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Microscopic theory of cavity-enhanced single-photon emission from optical two-photon Raman processes

Dominik Breddermann, Tom Praschan, Dirk Heinze, Rolf H. Binder, Stefan Schumacher

Published Mar 6, 2018• 6 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

During the last two decades, single-photon emission from two-photon Raman processes has been extensively studied both experimentally and theoretically in atomic as well as in quantum-dot multilevel systems. However, despite theoretical predictions on-demand emission, which is crucial for quantum networking, has not been achieved in experiments yet. Based on the cluster-expansion approach, the authors have performed an in-depth microscopic analysis of the Raman transition in fundamental three-level configurations. They find that excitation-induced destructive quantum interference and Stark shifts of the Raman resonance have to be taken into account in order to close in on on-demand single-photon emission.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.97.125303

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A sequence of single photons is emitted on demand from a single three-level atom strongly coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity. The photons are generated by an adiabatically driven stimulated Raman transition between two atomic ground states, with the vacuum field of the cavity stimulating one branch of the transition, and laser pulses deterministically driving the other branch. This process is unitary and therefore intrinsically reversible, which is essential for quantum communication and networking, and the photons should be appropriate for all-optical quantum information processing.
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Cavity quantum-electrodynamics experiments using an atom coupled to a single radiation-field mode have played a central role in testing foundations of quantum mechanics, thus motivating solid-state implementations using single quantum dots coupled to monolithic nano-cavities. In stark contrast to their atom based counterparts, the latter experiments revealed strong cavity emission, even when the quantum dot is far off resonance. Here we present experimental and theoretical results demonstrating that this effect arises from the mesoscopic nature of quantum dot confinement, ensuring the presence of a quasi-continuum of transitions between excited quantum dot states that are enhanced by the cavity mode. Our model fully explains photon correlation measurements demonstrating that photons emitted at the cavity frequency are essentially uncorrelated with each other even though they are generated by a single quantum dot.
The quantum dynamics of a hyper-Raman coupled model interacting with two modes of the quantized cavity field is described. The model consists of a four-level atom in a v configuration where transitions between the ground and excited states occur through the absorption (emission) of two photons from one mode and the emission (absorption) of one photon from the other and where two intermediate states are taken to be far off-resonance and are adiabatically removed. This is a multiphoton extension of the Jaynes-Cummings model and is exactly solvable. We study the atomic inversion and investigate the production of non-classical light exhibiting antibunching, violations of the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality, and squeezing.
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