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arXiv:2107.14720 · Photonics Research

Tunable photon blockade with a single atom in a cavity under electromagnetically induced transparency

Jing Tang, Yuangang Deng, Chaohong Lee

Published Apr 26, 2021• 24 citations
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Abstract

We present an experimental proposal to achieve a strong photon blockade by employing electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) with a single alkaline-earth-metal atom trapped in an optical cavity. In the presence of optical Stark shift, both the second-order correlation function and cavity transmission exhibit asymmetric structures between the red and blue sidebands of the cavity. For a weak control field, the photon quantum statistics for the coherent transparency window (i.e., atomic quasi-dark-state resonance) are insensitive to the Stark shift, which should also be immune to the spontaneous emission of the excited state by taking advantage of the intrinsic dark-state polariton of EIT. Interestingly, by exploiting the interplay between the Stark shift and control field, the strong photon blockade at atomic quasi-dark-state resonance has an optimal second-order correlation function g ( 2 ) ( 0 ) ∼ 10 − 4 and a high cavity transmission simultaneously. The underlying physical mechanism is ascribed to the Stark shift enhanced spectrum anharmonicity and the EIT hosted strong nonlinearity with loss-insensitive atomic quasi-dark-state resonance, which is essentially different from the conventional proposal with emerging Kerr nonlinearity in cavity-EIT. Our results reveal a new strategy to realize high-quality single photon sources, which could open up a new avenue for engineering nonclassical quantum states in cavity quantum electrodynamics.

DOI
10.1364/prj.419275

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We present an experimental proposal to achieve a strong photon blockade by employing electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) with a single alkaline-earth-metal atom trapped in an optical cavity. In the presence of optical Stark shift, both the second-order correlation function and cavity transmission exhibit asymmetric structures between the red and blue sidebands of the cavity. For a weak control field, the photon quantum statistics for the coherent transparency window (i.e., atomic quasi-dark-state resonance) are insensitive to the Stark shift, which should also be immune to the spontaneous emission of the excited state by taking advantage of the intrinsic dark-state polariton of EIT. Interestingly, by exploiting the interplay between the Stark shift and control field, the strong photon blockade at atomic quasi-dark-state resonance has an optimal second-order correlation function g ( 2 ) ( 0 ) ∼ 10 − 4 and a high cavity transmission simultaneously. The underlying physical mechanism is ascribed to the Stark shift enhanced spectrum anharmonicity and the EIT hosted strong nonlinearity with loss-insensitive atomic quasi-dark-state resonance, which is essentially different from the conventional proposal with emerging Kerr nonlinearity in cavity-EIT. Our results reveal a new strategy to realize high-quality single photon sources, which could open up a new avenue for engineering nonclassical quantum states in cavity quantum electrodynamics.
Photon blockade (PB) is one of the effective methods to generate single-photon sources. In general, both the PB effect with the significant sub-Poissonian statistics and a large mean photon number are desired to guarantee the brightness and the purity of single-photon sources. Here, we propose to obtain the PB effect at the cavity dark-state polariton (DSP) using a cavity Λ-type electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) system with and without the two-photon dissipation (TPD). In the Raman resonance case, the PB effect at the DSP could by realized by using the TPD process in the weak or intermediate coupling regime, which accompanies with near unity transmission, i.e., very high photon occupation. In the slightly detuned Raman resonance case, the excited state is induced into the components of the DSP, and the atomic dissipation path is added into the two-photon excitation paths. Thus, the PB effect at the DSP can be obtained due to the quantum destructive interference (QDI) in the strong coupling regime, which can be further enhanced using the TPD process. Due to the slight detuning, the PB effect still remains high photon occupation and has highly tunability. This work provides an alternative way to manipulate the photon statistics by the PB effect and has potential applications in generating single-photon sources with high brightness and purity.
The realization of nonlinear systems able to mediate strong interactions between light fields at the few photon level in an environment with minimal absorption represents a cornerstone for future developments of quantum information science and photonic quantum technologies.One approach to reach this goal is via strong coupling of single emitters to optical cavities as provided by cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED).The other one is via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) with single atoms or with atomic ensembles.This thesis reports on a system which merges both single-atom cavity QED in the strong coupling regime and EIT.First, we characterize this system theoretically and show that its energy eigenstates are very similar to the well known Jaynes-Cummings ladder of eigenstates.However, here, the eigenstates are optically controllable via the control field Rabi frequency provided by EIT.We show that increasing the control field Rabi frequency enhances the normalmode splitting, and therefore the effective light-matter coupling.Moreover, with this system we are able to observe photon blockade and a two-photon gateway for the same input probe field and to tune the behavior of the secondorder correlation function optically.Thanks to the long coherence times of EIT, photon blockade can be prolonged in time for longer times than the decay rates of the system.We refer to this effect as photon blockade with memory.Next, we verify our theoretical findings experimentally.By performing spectroscopy measurements on the single-atom cavity EIT system, we show an unprecedented EIT on/off contrast of about 80 % thanks to our strong atomcavity coupling rate.Later, we show experimentally, the ability to generate both, photon blockade and a two-photon gateway, for the same input field by just varying the control field Rabi frequency.Finally, by performing timedependent second-order correlations we observe strong oscillations in the correlations which are a result of the creation of a new light field in the cavity which beats with the impinging probe laser.We show experimentally that this new field has a coherence time longer than the decay rates of the system, confirming its EIT origin.In a final experiment, we take advantage of the strong atom-cavity coupling achieved to induce a group delay on probing pulses.Delays up to approximately 200 ns are measured.This is the first time a group delay is observed with a single atom as the delaying medium.iii
Single photons and single-photon pairs, inherently nonclassical in their nature, are fundamental elements of quantum sciences and technologies. Here, we propose to realize the nonclassical correlated deterministic photon pairs at the single-photon level for a single atom trapped in bimodal cavities. It is shown that the photon emissions for bimodal cavities exhibit a high single-photon purity and relatively large intracavity photon numbers, which are ascribed to the combination of optical Stark-shift enhanced energy-spectrum anharmonicity and quantum interference suppressed two-photon excitation. Our scheme generates photon-photon pairs with strong photon blockade for cavity modes via constructing a highly tunable cavity-enhanced deterministic parametric down-conversion process. Furthermore, we show that the cross-correlation function between the two cavity modes vastly violates the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality of the classical boundary, which unambiguously demonstrates the nonclassicality of the single-photon pairs. Our result reveals a prominent strategy to generate the high-quality two-mode single-photon sources with strong nonclassical correlation, which could provide versatile applications in distribution of quantum networks, long-distance quantum communication, and fundamental tests of quantum physics.
Realizing single-photon sources plays an essential role in quantum information science. The key step for generating a single photon is to attain strong photon blockade, based on either strong energy-spectrum anharmonicity or quantum interference to eliminate two-photon excitation. However, the strong coupling in a high-finesse cavity that is needed for these mechanisms is still a challenge. In this work, strong photon antibunching with a large cavity photon number is predicted, by combining the optical Stark shift with anharmonicity and quantum interference beyond the strong-coupling regime. This proposal suggests exciting opportunities for applications in e.g.e.g.e.g. quantum networks.
We present an experimental study of cavity-assisted Rydberg-atom electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) using a high-finesse optical cavity ($F\ensuremath{\sim}28\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}000$). Rydberg atoms are excited via a two-photon transition in a ladder-type EIT configuration. A three-peak structure of the cavity transmission spectrum is observed when Rydberg EIT is generated inside the cavity. The two symmetrically spaced side peaks are caused by bright-state polaritons, while the central peak corresponds to a dark-state polariton. Anticrossing phenomena and the effects of mirror adsorbate electric fields are studied under different experimental conditions. We determine a lower bound on the coherence time for the system of $7.26\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.06\phantom{\rule{1em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{s}$, most likely limited by laser dephasing. The cavity-Rydberg EIT system can be useful for single-photon generation using the Rydberg blockade effect, studying many-body physics, and generating novel quantum states among many other applications.
We present a theoretical scheme to study optical cavity quantum electrodynamics using dark-state polaritons. Exploiting the highly tunable lifetimes of the photons in the form of cavity dark-state polaritons, we push the strong coupling of single optical photons to an effective two-level emitter in a Rydberg-blockade atomic ensemble to an unprecedented regime. The resulting Jaynes--Cummings model with extremely strong coupling is of fundamental interest. We discuss applications in controlled quantum Rabi oscillation, nonlinear spectroscopy of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder, as well as the generation of nonclassical states, all based on light-matter interactions in the optical domain.