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Physical Review A

Single-photon emitter based on an ensemble of lattice-trapped interacting atoms

Deshui Yu

Published Jun 13, 2014• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Precisely controlling the atom number challenges the single-photon generation based on an individual neutral atom in experiments. A straightforward solution is to directly produce single photons via a number of atoms. We theoretically investigate such a single-photon emitter in which a bunch of Sr atoms are tightly confined in a blue-detuned optical lattice and weakly driven by an external field. The strong long-range interatomic interactions inducing large excitation-energy shifts results in a significant suppression of multiphoton emission. We consider two common approaches, which are widely used in experiments to generate single photons, in detail. The results indicate a potential to built up a single-photon source based on an ensemble of interacting atoms.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.89.063809

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Precisely controlling the atom number challenges the single-photon generation based on an individual neutral atom in experiments. A straightforward solution is to directly produce single photons via a number of atoms. We theoretically investigate such a single-photon emitter in which a bunch of Sr atoms are tightly confined in a blue-detuned optical lattice and weakly driven by an external field. The strong long-range interatomic interactions inducing large excitation-energy shifts results in a significant suppression of multiphoton emission. We consider two common approaches, which are widely used in experiments to generate single photons, in detail. The results indicate a potential to built up a single-photon source based on an ensemble of interacting atoms.
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.
The preparation of light pulses with well-defined quantum properties requires precise control at the individual photon level. Here, we demonstrate exact and controlled multi-photon subtraction from incoming light pulses. We employ a cascaded system of tightly confined cold atom ensembles with strong, collectively enhanced coupling of photons to Rydberg states. The excitation blockade resulting from interactions between Rydberg atoms limits photon absorption to one per ensemble and rapid dephasing of the collective excitation suppresses stimulated re-emission of the photon. We experimentally demonstrate subtraction with up to three absorbers. Furthermore, we present a thorough theoretical analysis of our scheme where we identify weak Raman decay of the long-lived Rydberg state as the main source of infidelity in the subtracted photon number and investigate the performance of the multi-photon subtractor for increasing absorber numbers in the presence of Raman decay.
Summary form only given. Optical lattices provide new opportunities to create entangled states of neutral atoms for quantum information processing. Such systems have some attractive features: decoherence is suppressed because neutrals couple weakly to the environment, and operations can be performed in parallel on a large ensemble of trapped atoms, thus offering avenues for scaling to many qubits. The main source of decoherence is spontaneous emission, but this can be negligible if all manipulations are performed rapidly compared to the photon scattering rate. We consider here the possibility of using resonantly induced electric dipole-dipole interactions to engineer two-qubit operations such as the swap gate and the controlled-phase which, together with single qubit operations, can perform arbitrary quantum computations.
The achievement of sufficiently fast interactions between two optical fields at the few-photon level would provide a key enabler for a broad range of quantum technologies. One critical hurdle in this endeavor is the lack of a comprehensive quantum theory of the generation of nonlinearities by ensembles of emitters. Distinct approaches applicable to different regimes have yielded important insights: i) a semiclassical approach reveals that, for many-photon coherent fields, the contributions of independent emitters add independently allowing ensembles to produce strong optical nonlinearities via EIT; ii) a quantum analysis has shown that in the few-photon regime collective coupling effects prevent ensembles from inducing these strong nonlinearities. Rather surprisingly, experimental results with around twenty photons are in line with the semi-classical predictions. Theoretical analysis has been fragmented due to the difficulty of treating nonlinear many-body quantum systems. Here we are able to solve this problem by constructing a powerful theory of the generation of optical nonlinearities by single emitters and ensembles. The key to this construction is the application of perturbation theory to perturbations generated by subsystems. This theory reveals critical properties of ensembles that have long been obscure. The most remarkable of these is the discovery that quantum effects prevent ensembles generating single-photon nonlinearities only within the rotating-wave regime; outside this regime single-photon nonlinearities scale as the number of emitters. The theory we present here also provides an efficient way to calculate nonlinearities for arbitrary multi-level driving schemes, and we expect that it will prove a powerful foundation for further advances in this area.
We systematically investigate the far-zone fluorescence from a number of laser-driven two-level atoms with the cooperative effects stemming from the virtual exchange of photons between identical atoms. Due to the large interaction-induced energy level shifts, i.e. the collective Lamb shifts, both atomic excitation and photon emission do not maximize at the resonant light-atom coupling. In addition, the long-range dissipative interactions among atoms lead to the disproportion between the atomic excitation and the photon emission. Moreover, we discuss the temporal properties of the far-field fluorescence light from the atomic ensemble. The first-order correlation function indicates a damped light-atom dynamics combined with a strong background of the elastic photon scattering. The second-order correlation function illustrates that in the weak-excitation limit the scattered light exhibits the nonclassical photon antibunching behavior, while the bunched photons arrive at the photodetector in the saturated-excitation limit.