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arXiv:1809.07621 · New Journal of Physics

Photon-antibunching in the fluorescence of statistical ensembles of emitters at an optical nanofiber-tip

Elmer Suarez, David Auwärter, Tiago J. Arruda, Romain Bachelard, Ph. W. Courteille, Claus Zimmermann, Sebastian Slama

Published Feb 26, 2019• 13 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

This proposal investigates the photon-statistics of light emitted by a statistical ensemble of cold atoms excited by the near-field of an optical nanofiber tip. Dipole-dipole interactions of atoms at such short distance from each other suppress the simultaneous emission of more than one photon and lead to antibunching of photons. We consider a mean atom number on the order of one and deal with a poissonian mixture of one and two atoms including dipole-dipole interactions and collective decay. Time tracks of the atomic states are simulated in quantum Monte Carlo simulations from which the $g^{(2)}$-photon autocorrelation function is derived. The general results can be applied to any statistical ensemble of emitters that are interacting by dipole-dipole interactions.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/ab0a99

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New effects can arise in quantum physics when there is strong coupling, either between atoms and light or between different quantum systems. This thesis examines an optical nanofiber atom trap as a mediator of atom-light interactions and a potential element of a hybrid quantum system. The evanescent field around the sub-wavelength waist of an optical nanofiber possesses a small mode area that increases the cooperativity between atoms and the mode, in a manner analogous to traditional cavity QED. We demonstrate trapping of 87^{87}87Rb atoms with an optical nanofiber, confining hundreds of atoms with typical trap lifetimes of tens of milliseconds. We then employ single photon counting techniques to study untrapped ensembles of cold atoms around the nanofiber. A first experiment uses intensity autocorrelations of resonance fluorescence emitted into the nanofiber mode to observe a transition from classical to nonclassical photon statistics. Measuring the correlations on longer timescales reveals the motion of atoms through the optical mode, and we develop a correspondence between the transit time and atomic cloud temperature. A second experiment measures Purcell enhancement of spontaneous emission of atoms near the nanofiber by correlating their fluorescence with a known trigger event. The spontaneous decay rate of an atom near a dielectric is modified by the induced dipole and by a change in the modes of the vacuum electromagnetic field. Our observed enhancement of 6.5±0.9%6.5\pm0.9\%6.5±0.9% over the free-space rate matches well with what one finds from mode simulations in our system.
We investigate the photon statistics of light emitted from a system of collectively interacting dipoles in the low-intensity regime, incorporating double-excitation states to capture beyond-single-excitation effects. By analyzing the eigenstates of the double-excitation manifold, we establish their connection to the accessible single-excitation eigenmodes and investigate the role of decay rates in shaping the zero-time-delay photon correlation function g(2)(τ=0)g^{(2)}(τ= 0)g(2)(τ=0) under different detection schemes. The photon emission statistics can be arbitrarily controlled by interfering two beams of light that selectively address orthogonal eigenmodes. This can act as a tunable nonlinearity that enables both enhancement or suppression of two-photon emission.
We experimentally investigate the photon correlations in resonance fluorescence from a few atoms into the guided modes of the nanofiber. We show that, when the photons are emitted in the same direction, the photon correlation varies from antibunching to bunching with increasing atom number and, when the photons are emitted in the opposite directions, the photon correlation is always antibunchinglike regardless of the number of atoms. The effect of excitation geometry on the photon correlations is also discussed.
Collective excitations in regular structures of strongly interacting driven dipoles have been found to lead to strongly antibunched statistics of the emitted photons $[{g}^{(2)}(0)\ensuremath{\ll}0.5]$, but precise control of the number of emitters and their spatial distribution is in general a complex experimental task. We overcome this limitation by showing quantum light emission from densely packed driven dipoles does not require their arrangement in any specific structure, pointing strongly towards possible single-photon sources based on hot thermal vapors confined within nanocells, or on irregular quantum dot ensembles.
We investigate the radiative coupling between two two-level atoms with arbitrarily polarized dipoles in the vicinity of a nanofiber. We present a systematic derivation for the master equation, the single- and cross-atom decay coefficients, and the dipole-dipole interaction coefficients for the atoms interacting with the vacuum of the field in the guided and radiation modes of the nanofiber. We study numerically the case where the atomic dipoles are circularly polarized. In this case, the rate of emission depends on the propagation direction along the fiber axis and, hence, the radiative interaction between the atoms is chiral. We examine the time evolution of the atoms for different initial states. We calculate the fluxes and mean numbers of photons spontaneously emitted into guided modes in the positive and negative directions of the fiber axis. We show that the chiral radiative coupling modifies the collective emission of the atoms. We observe that the modifications strongly depend on the initial state of the atomic system, the radiative transfer direction, the distance between the atoms, and the distance from the atoms to the fiber surface.
Scattering is a general process in both fundamental and applied physics. In this paper, we investigate Rayleigh scattering of a solid-state-emitter coupled to a nanofiber, by SSS-matrix-like theory in kkk-space description. Under this model, both Rayleigh scattering and dipole interaction are studied between a two-level artificial atom embedded in a nanocrystal and fiber modes (guided and radiation modes). It is found that Rayleigh scattering plays a critical role in the transport properties and quantum statistics of photons. On the one hand, Rayleigh scattering produces the transparency in the optical transmitted field of the nanofiber, accompanied by the change of atomic phase, population, and frequency shift. On the other hand, the interference between two kinds of scattering fields by Rayleigh scattering and dipole transition modifies the photon statistics (second-order autocorrelation function) of output fields, showing a strong wavelength dependence. This study provides guidance for the solid-state emitter acting as a single-photon source and can be extended to explore the scattering effect in many-body physics.