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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Quantum optics in directional one-dimensional photonic reservoirs (Presentation Recording)

Immo Söllner, Peter Lodahl

Published Sep 1, 2015• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present a novel photonic crystal waveguide, engineered to support broadband modes with circular in-plane polarization. We show experimental evidence that for single-photon emitters with circular dipoles these waveguides act as near-lossless unidirectional photonic reservoirs, where the emission direction is given by the helicity of the dipole. This directional coupling has a strong effect on the scattering of single photons transmitted through the system and we discuss how counter-propagating photons acquire a relative phase of π. Combining this effect with photonic structures that can map a phase to a propagation path, we show how one can create nonreciprocal photonic elements.

DOI
10.1117/12.2190090

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We present a novel photonic crystal waveguide, engineered to support broadband modes with circular in-plane polarization. We show experimental evidence that for single-photon emitters with circular dipoles these waveguides act as near-lossless unidirectional photonic reservoirs, where the emission direction is given by the helicity of the dipole. This directional coupling has a strong effect on the scattering of single photons transmitted through the system and we discuss how counter-propagating photons acquire a relative phase of π. Combining this effect with photonic structures that can map a phase to a propagation path, we show how one can create nonreciprocal photonic elements.
Cavity quantum electrodynamics studies light-matter interactions at single quanta level. Chiral photon-emitter coupling in photonic structures is characterized as unidirectional propagation locked by the local polarization of light. However, to realize the strong interaction of photon-emitter with direction-locked propagation, which will bring novel applications in nonreciprocal quantum devices, has not been reported yet. Here, we propose the coupled photonic crystal and metallic nanoparticle structure, where through strong local field with high helicity, the rate of circularly polarized photons emitting into photonic crystal waveguide is one order larger than that without the nanoparticle and the linewidth of Rabi splitting spectra is about one-tenth of that with only the nanoparticle, both with ∼\sim∼ 95%\%% photons propagating unidirectionally, which can be utilized in directional quantum light sources.
Up to now it remains challenging to couple photons from a circularly polarized emitter into a photonic structure to simultaneously realize strong photon-emitter interaction and unidirectional propagation locked by local helicity of the optical mode at the nanoscale. In this paper we propose a unique approach that combines a photonic crystal and metallic nanoparticle structure to create nanocavities with both strong local-field intensity and high helicity. In this system the rate of circularly polarized photons emitting into the photonic crystal waveguide reaches $148{\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{0}$, which is one order of magnitude larger than that without the nanoparticle, and in the ultranarrow band-edge mode the linewidth of Rabi splitting spectra is about one-tenth of that with the nanoparticle only, both with $\ensuremath{\approx}95%$ of photons propagating unidirectionally along the nanoscale waveguide. We suggest that our paper establishes a nanophotonic interface of chiral quantum electrodynamics for on-chip nonreciprocal quantum light sources, quantum circuits, and scalable quantum networks.
This Thesis is focused on the study of quantum electrodynamics in photonic crystal waveguides. We investigate the interplay between a single quantum dot and the fundamental mode of the photonic crystal waveguide. We demonstrate experimental coupling eciencies for the spontaneous emission into the mode exceeding 98% for emitters spectrally close to the band-edge of the waveguide mode. In addition we illustrate the broadband nature of the underlying eects, by obtaining coupling eciencies above 90% for quantum dots detuned from the band edge by as far as 20nm. These values are in good agreement with numerical simulations. Such a high coupling eciency implies that the system can be considered an articial 1D-atom, and we theoretically show that this system can generate strong photon-photon interaction, which is an essential functionality for deterministic optical quantum information processing. We present the progress towards the experimental demonstration of such a strong photon-photon nonlinearity. We present the rst signatures of resonant transmission in photonic crystal waveguides and discuss some of the encountered diculties and future directions of the experiments. In the nal part of this Thesis we discuss a novel type of photonic crystal waveguide and show its applications for on-chip quantum information processing. This structure was designed for the ecient mapping of two orthogonal circular dipole transitions to dierent propagation paths of the emitted photon, i.e. exhibits chiral quantum-dot-waveguide coupling. Such a structure is ideally suited for a number of applications in quantum information processing and among others we propose an on-chip spin-photon interface, a single photon transistor, and a deterministic cNOT gate.
A three-dimensional (3D) photonic waveguide array is proposed to simulate the concept of reservoir-engineering-induced nonreciprocal transmission. The reservoir is offered by coupling two optical modes simultaneously to an additional mode with loss, yielding a jump operator, which is a coherent superposition of annihilation operators of these two modes. The waveguides are helically curved, leading to a synthetic gauge field for the propagating photons and consequently an adjustable phase factor for the jump operator. The unidirectional coupling is derived analytically and verified numerically, and an intuitive interpretation is provided. Furthermore, the model is extended to a periodic lattice, where asymmetric hopping arises and unidirectional hopping appears for certain Bloch wave vectors. Our design is based on real-experiment parameters, which can be readily implemented by femtosecond laser direct writing of 3D waveguides in silica.
Nanophotonic components allow the control of the flow of light in integrated optical environments. Thereby, the light’s strong confinement leads to an inherent link between its local polarization and propagation direction which fundamentally alters the physics of light-matter interaction and gives rise to phenomena such as directional emission and direction-dependent coupling strengths [1]. I will present the underlying principles of this chiral light-matter interaction and its consequences for integrated applications [1]. In particular, I will show how we employ this effect to control the direction of spontaneous emission [2] and to realize low-loss nonreciprocal transmission at the single-photon level through a silica nanofiber [3]. We use two different approaches where either an ensemble of spin-polarized atoms is weakly coupled to a nanofiber or a single atom is strongly coupled to the nanofiber via a whispering-gallery-mode resonator. The resulting optical isolators show a strong imbalance between the transmissions in forward and reverse direction and, at the same time, a forward transmissions exceeding 70%. We extended this system to a 4-port device, where a single atom routes photons nonreciprocally from one fiber port to the next. This realizes a quantum optical circulator [4] which can even be prepared in a superposition of its operational modes. The demonstrated systems exemplify a new class of (quantum) nanophotonic devices that are ideally suited for photonic quantum information processing and quantum simulation. [1] Nature 541, 473, (2017). [2] Science 346, 67 (2014). [3] Phys. Rev. X 5, 041036 (2015). [4] Science 354, 1577 (2016).
A quantum emitter efficiently coupled to a nanophotonic waveguide constitutes a promising system for the realization of single-photon transistors, quantum-logic gates based on giant single-photon nonlinearities, and high bit-rate deterministic single-photon sources. The key figure of merit for such devices is the β factor, which is the probability for an emitted single photon to be channeled into a desired waveguide mode. We report on the experimental achievement of β=98.43%±0.04% for a quantum dot coupled to a photonic crystal waveguide, corresponding to a single-emitter cooperativity of η=62.7±1.5. This constitutes a nearly ideal photon-matter interface where the quantum dot acts effectively as a 1D "artificial" atom, since it interacts almost exclusively with just a single propagating optical mode. The β factor is found to be remarkably robust to variations in position and emission wavelength of the quantum dots. Our work demonstrates the extraordinary potential of photonic crystal waveguides for highly efficient single-photon generation and on-chip photon-photon interaction.