Photon echo of a single light pulse

S. O. Elyutin, Sergey M. Zakharov, Edward A. Manykin

I. V. Evseev, Решетов Владимир Александрович

S. O. Elyutin, Sergey M. Zakharov, Edward A. Manykin

G. N. Nikolaev

In investigations of predicted new types of photon echoes — an echo from a homogeneous ensemble of atoms and an echo of a single light pulse — have established that the magnitude and form of these new types of photon echoes are completely determined by the type of optical transition and by the “area” and polarization of the exciting light pulses (and the form can be controlled by varying the magnetic field). It is also established that the echo amplitude decreases for both small (compared to 1) and large light-pulse areas, and the optimal areas for which the maximum echo is obtained have been found. Investigations show that such photon echoes can also appear under conditions when an ordinary photon echo is absent (in atomic or molecular gases at high pressure, in the far-IR region of the spectrum, from cooled trapped atoms or ions, and so on).

Nicolas Sangouard, Christoph Simon, Jiří Minář +6 more

The three-pulse photon echo is a well-known technique to store intense light pulses in an inhomogeneously broadened atomic ensemble. This protocol is attractive because it is relatively simple and it is well suited for the storage of multiple temporal modes. Furthermore, it offers very long storage times, greater than the phase relaxation time. Here, we consider the three-pulse photon echo in both two- and three-level systems as a potential technique for the storage of light at the single-photon level. By explicit calculations, we show that the ratio between the echo signal corresponding to a single-photon input and the noise is smaller than one. This severely limits the achievable fidelity of the quantum state storage, making the three-pulse photon echo unsuitable for single-photon quantum memory.

Cheng Li, Xiangyang Yu