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Frontiers in Optics

Zero-Area Ultrashort Single Photons

L. S. Costanzo, A. S. Coelho, Daniele Pellegrino, Milrian S. Mendes, L. H. Acioli, K. N. Cassemiro, D. Felinto, Alessandro Zavatta, Marco Bellini

Published Jan 1, 2015• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate that the interaction of ultrashort single photons with a dense resonant atomic sample deeply modifies the temporal shape of their wavepacket mode without degrading their non-classical character, and effectively generates zero-area single-photon pulses.
DOI
10.1364/fio.2015.fw5a.2

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Single photons are ideal information carriers, but their limited interaction among themselves and with the surrounding environment poses a major challenge for developing a completely optical quantum processor. One possible solution lies in hybrid photon-atom approaches, but common sense suggests that an efficient coupling can be achieved only with correspondingly narrowband resonant single photons, and that ultrashort single photons with bandwidths in the THz range would be useless for this purpose given their very weak interaction with atoms. In recent experiments, we have shown that, against common intuition, a single photon of extremely short duration, and thus possessing a wide range of different colors, can still strongly interact with very monochromatic atoms.
Single photons exhibit inherently quantum and unintuitive properties such as the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect, demonstrating their bosonic and quantized nature, yet at the same time may correspond to single excitations of spatial or temporal modes with a very complex structure. Those two features are rarely seen together. Here we experimentally demonstrate how the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect can be spectrally resolved and harnessed to characterize a complex temporal mode of a single-photon-a zero-area pulse-obtained via a resonant interaction of a terahertz-bandwidth photon with a narrow gigahertz-wide atomic transition of atomic vapor. The combination of bosonic quantum behavior with bandwidth-mismatched light-atom interaction is of fundamental importance for deeper understanding of both phenomena, as well as their engineering offering applications in characterization of ultrafast transient processes.