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arXiv:2003.08709 · Physical Review Letters

Atom-Photon Spin-Exchange Collisions Mediated by Rydberg Dressing

Fan Yang, Yong‐Chun Liu, Li You

Published Sep 28, 2020• 13 citations
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Abstract

We show that a single photon propagating through a Rydberg-dressed atomic ensemble can exchange its spin state with a single atom. Such a spin-exchange collision exhibits both dissipative and coherent features, depending on the interaction strength. For strong interaction, the collision dissipatively drives the system into an entangled dark state of the photon with an atom. In the weak interaction regime, the scattering coherently flips the spin of a single photon in the multiphoton input pulse, demonstrating a generic single-photon subtracting process. An analytical treatment of this process reveals a universal trade-off between efficiency and purity of the extracted photon, which applies to a wide class of single-photon subtractors. We show that such a trade-off can be optimized by adjusting the scattering rate under a novel phase-matching condition.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.125.143601

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We show that a single photon propagating through a Rydberg-dressed atomic ensemble can exchange its spin state with a single atom. Such a spin-exchange collision exhibits both dissipative and coherent features, depending on the interaction strength. For strong interaction, the collision dissipatively drives the system into an entangled dark state of the photon with an atom. In the weak interaction regime, the scattering coherently flips the spin of a single photon in the multiphoton input pulse, demonstrating a generic single-photon subtracting process. An analytical treatment of this process reveals a universal trade-off between efficiency and purity of the extracted photon, which applies to a wide class of single-photon subtractors. We show that such a trade-off can be optimized by adjusting the scattering rate under a novel phase-matching condition.
Interacting Rydberg excitations in cold atomic ensembles can exhibit large quantum nonlinearities that enable engineering of strong interactions between individual photons. Consequently, Rydberg ensembles are a promising platform for quantum information applications and the study of more fundamental physics of few- and many-body phenomena with interacting photons. This thesis presents a series of experiments that study and exploit different regimes of Rydberg-mediated interactions. We report the realization of an efficient on-demand single-photon source. The strong long-range Rydberg interactions allow the excitation of only a single collective Rydberg state within the entire atomic medium. The collective excitation can be subsequently retrieved as a single-photon. We use this scheme to generate highly pure and highly indistinguishable photons, which are suitable for scalable quantum information applications. These photons can be compatible with other atomic systems due to their narrow bandwidth, which makes building practical hybrid quantum systems feasible. Here, we demonstrate high visibility two-photon quantum interference between our Rydberg-produced photons, and photons emitted by a remote single-trapped ion. We also study Rydberg atoms under electromagnetically induced transparency conditions, where coherent superpostions of photons and Rydberg excitations propagate through the atomic medium as lossless dark-state polaritons. In the experiment, we use the external control fields to tune the interactions to a many-body regime where we can observe resonant scattering of dark-state polaritons to lossy channels. We show that the enhanced scattering process arises as a pure three-body effect.
We demonstrate a Rydberg-dressed ground-state blockade that provides a strong tunable interaction energy (~1 MHz), nearly 4 orders of magnitude larger than that in ultra cold collisions, between spins of individually trapped cesium atoms.With this interaction we directly produce Bell-state entanglement between two atoms with a fidelity ≥ 81(2)%, excluding atom loss events, and ≥ 60(3)% when loss is included [1].Our method is based on a Rydberg-dressed spin-flip blockade which allows single-step, direct entanglement of long-lived ground (clock) states.For the Bell-state entanglement generation, the probability remains entirely in the Rydbergdressed ground state, freeing the approach from the experimental burden of coherently exciting optical transitions to and from the Rydberg states.In principle Rydberg-dressed atoms are more insensitive to various decoherence mechanisms and lead to a better quantum control fidelity [2].In addition, we observed Jaynes-Cummings (JC) ladder and its nonlinearity of a Rydbergdressed atomic system.This nonlinearity induced by the Rydberg-dressed spin-flip blockade and the symmetric coupling between a Rydberg atom and atomic ensembles in the ground state, and this differentiates single and two microwave photon excitations from Rydberg-dressed state atoms.
We propose an efficient free-space scheme to create single photons in a well-defined spatiotemporal mode. To that end, we first prepare a single source atom in an excited Rydberg state. The source atom interacts with a large ensemble of ground-state atoms via a laser-mediated dipole-dipole exchange interaction. Using an adiabatic passage with a chirped laser pulse, we produce a spatially extended spin wave of a single Rydberg excitation in the ensemble, accompanied by the transition of the source atom to another Rydberg state. The collective atomic excitation can then be converted to a propagating optical photon via a coherent coupling field. In contrast to previous approaches, our single-photon source does not rely on the strong coupling of a single emitter to a resonant cavity, nor does it require the heralding of collective excitation or complete Rydberg blockade of multiple excitations in the atomic ensemble.
We study the interaction of two photons in a Rydberg atomic ensemble under the condition of electromagnetically induced transparency, combining a semiclassical approach for pulse propagation and a complete quantum treatment for quantum state evolution. We find that the blockade regime is not suitable for implementing photon-photon cross-phase modulation due to pulse absorption and dispersion. However, approximately ideal cross-phase modulation can be realized based on relatively weak interactions, with counterpropagating and transversely separated pulses.
We investigate the interaction of weak light fields with two-dimensional lattices of atoms with high lying atomic Rydberg states. This system features different interactions that act on disparate length scales, from zero-range defect scattering of atomic excitations and finite-range dipole exchange processes to long-range Rydberg-state interactions, which span the entire array and can block multiple Rydberg excitations. Analyzing their interplay, we identify conditions that yield a nonlinear quantum mirror which coherently splits incident fields into correlated photon-pairs in a single transverse mode, while transmitting single photons unaffected. In particular, we find strong anti-bunching of the transmitted light with equal-time pair correlations that decrease exponentially with an increasing range of the Rydberg blockade. Such strong photon-photon interactions in the absence of photon losses open up promising avenues for the generation and manipulation of quantum light, and the exploration of many-body phenomena with interacting photons.
We propose a scheme for rapid generation of high fidelity steady-state entanglement between a pair of atoms. A two-photon excitation process toward long-lived Rydberg states with finite pairwise interaction, a dark-state interference effect in the individual atoms, and spontaneous emission from their short-lived excited states lead to rapid, dissipative formation of an entangled steady state. We show that for a wide range of physical parameters, this entangled state is formed on a time scale given by the strengths of coherent Raman and Rabi fields applied to the atoms, while it is only weakly dependent on the Rydberg interaction strength.