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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series A Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Atoms in strong light-fields: photon antibunching in single atom fluorescence

Claude N. Cohen-Tannoudji, Serge Reynaud

Published Dec 20, 1979• 119 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Some general remarks and suggestions concerning photon antibunching in single atom fluorescence are presented. The close connection between this antibunching effect and the ‘ reduction of the wave packet ’ due to the detection process is made explicit. It is pointed out that polarization effects could considerably change the shape of the signals. A dressed atom approach to these problems reveals analogies with quantum beats and suggests the use of frequency filters at the detection, selecting one component of the fluorescence spectrum and leading to new types of photon correlation signals.

DOI
10.1098/rsta.1979.0092

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Abstract Some general remarks and suggestions concerning photon antibunching in single atom fluorescence are presented. The close connection between this antibunching effect and the ‘ reduction of the wave packet ’ due to the detection process is made explicit. It is pointed out that polarization effects could considerably change the shape of the signals. A dressed atom approach to these problems reveals analogies with quantum beats and suggests the use of frequency filters at the detection, selecting one component of the fluorescence spectrum and leading to new types of photon correlation signals.
We study the correlation between photons in the fluorescence light scattered from an atom driven by an intense bichromatic field having one strong and one weak component, with or without the use of frequency filters in front of the photodetectors. Depending on the filters used and on the spectral components selected, we predict signals corresponding either to bunching or to antibunching, and modulations at the driving field Rabi frequencies as well as at their sum and difference. In contrast with the case of monochromatic driving, the antibunching can occur between photons emitted into different (as well as the same) lines of the fluorescence spectrum.
A review is given of recent theoretical studies devoted to the problem of generating radiation fields that exhibit the opposite of the well-known bunching of photons observed in light from thermal sources, the so-called antibunching effect. It is made clear that this phenomenon reflects the corpuscular nature of light and, hence, cannot be interpreted in terms of classical electrodynamics, needing, instead, the quantum-mechanical formalism for its description. It is shown in some detail that nonlinear interaction mechanisms like multiphoton absorption and parametric three-wave interaction are suited to change the photon statistical properties of incident (in most cases coherent) light such that the output field will be endowed with antibunching properties. Special emphasis is given to the problem of correctly specifying the dimensions of the mode volume occurring in the usual single-mode treatment of the field, which is, in fact, of great practical interest, since the magnitude of the antibunching effect is determined by the inverse average number of photons contained in that volume. In a later section it is pointed out that destructive interference with a coherent reference beam provides a means of (a) effectively enhancing photon antibunching that is already present in a high-intensity field, through reduction of the intensity, and (b) transforming phase fluctuations produced in a Kerr medium into antibunching-type intensity fluctuations. On the other hand, there exists a way of directly generating light with antibunching properties, the physical mechanism being resonance fluorescence from a single atom. The main features of this technique, both theoretical and experimental, are outlined, including a discussion of the first experimental results obtained a few years ago.
The equal-time intensity correlation function and variances of the in-phase and out-of-phase components of the electric field radiated by a system of two interacting atoms in the process of resonance fluorescence are calculated analytically for arbitrary values of the field strength, interatomic interaction, and detuning and are illustrated graphically. It is shown that not only photon antibuching but also squeezing can occur in two-atom resonance fluorescence. The influence of dipole-dipole interaction between the atoms on both nonclassical effects is discussed. It is shown that a considerable amount of photon antibunching and squeezing can be obtained for finite detuning of the laser frequency from atomic resonance, especially when the detuning and dipole-dipole interaction parameters cancel out mutually. The maximum value of squeezing for interacting atoms is shown to be less, however, than that for noninteracting atoms. Very strong dipole-dipole interaction reduces the squeezing effect to zero.
We suggest that the statistical properties of the scattered radiation in resonance-fluorescence experiments may be affected significantly by the existence of atomic correlations. The scattered light spectrum from two- and three-atom collective systems has been calculated and compared with the one-atom spectrum. The differences are quite significant for weak fields, but become less pronounced as the intensity of the driving field is increased. In addition, we have calculated the scattered intensity correlation function for collectively interacting systems, and found that its behavior is very different from that of the single-atom intensity correlation function, both for weak and strong incident fields. The implications of our findings for the observation of photon antibunching are also discussed.
One of the experiments made possible by the trapping and cooling of a single atom is to observe the quantum jumps to a metastable state in the atom by monitoring the resonance fluorescence of a strong transition in which at least one of the states is coupled to the metastable state. When the atomic electron moves to the metastable state, the fluorescence from the strongly driven transition disappears. When the electron drops back into the strongly driven transition, the fluorescence abruptly returns. Statistical analysis of these random interruptions to the fluorescence signal implies photon antibunching in the emission of the weak photon.