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Scientific Reports

Single-photon transistor based on cavity electromagnetically induced transparency with Rydberg atomic ensemble

Yaming Hao, Guang Lin, Xiu‐Min Lin, Yueping Niu, Shuang Gong

Published Mar 18, 2019• 19 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A scheme is presented to realize a single-photon transistor based on cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) with Rydberg atomic ensemble. By combining the advantages of the cavity-enhanced interaction and Rydberg blockade, we achieve a high gain single-photon transistor. The numerical calculation shows that by using one single gate photon more than one thousand source photons can be switched.

DOI
10.1038/s41598-019-41185-2

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A scheme is presented to realize a single-photon transistor based on cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) with Rydberg atomic ensemble. By combining the advantages of the cavity-enhanced interaction and Rydberg blockade, we achieve a high gain single-photon transistor. The numerical calculation shows that by using one single gate photon more than one thousand source photons can be switched.
Mapping the strong interaction between Rydberg atoms onto single photons via electromagnetically induced transparency enables manipulation of light on the single photon level and novel few-photon devices such as all-optical switches and transistors operated by individual photons. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that Stark-tuned Forster resonances can substantially increase this effective interaction between individual photons. This technique boosts the gain of a single-photon transistor to over 100, enhances the non-destructive detection of single Rydberg atoms to a fidelity beyond 0.8, and enables high precision spectroscopy on Rydberg pair states. On top, we achieve a gain larger than 2 with gate photon read-out after the transistor operation. Theory models for Rydberg polariton propagation on Forster resonance and for the projection of the stored spin-wave yield excellent agreement to our data and successfully identify the main decoherence mechanism of the Rydberg transistor, paving the way towards photonic quantum gates.
This thesis reports the experimental realisation of a single-photon switch and transistor.To this end, Rydberg blockade in electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) is used to create an interaction between two light pulses at the single photon level.In the experiment, a gate pulse containing one incoming photon on average is stored as a Rydberg excitation in an ultracold atomic gas using EIT.Subsequently a target light pulse is sent through the atomic ensemble.Without the gate pulse, the medium would be transparent due to EIT and the transmission would be high.If a gate excitation has been stored, however, Rydberg blockade suppresses the transmission of the target light pulse.The stored gate photon can be retrieved after the transmission of the target light.A retrieved photon heralds successful storage.In the corresponding postselected subensemble the transmission of the target light is reduced by an extinction factor of 0.05.This reduction is robust if the number of incoming gate photons or target photons is varied.In a conceptually improved version of the experiment, a single-photon transistor is realised that shows a gain above unity.The gain quantifies the change in the transmitted target photon number per incoming gate photon.For one incoming gate photon on average, a gain of 20 is observed.The improved experiment uses a Förster resonance, the benefit of which becomes directly evident in an improved gain and extinction.If a Rydberg excitation is created during the gate pulse, then the transmission of the target light pulse drops substantially.By setting a discrimination threshold for the number of detected target photons, it is possible to detect in a single shot with a fidelity of 86% whether a Rydberg excitation was created during the gate pulse.Since the gate excitation is not retrieved by the target light, this detection method is nondestructive.i iii 6.2.Experimental Sequence . . . . . . .
We propose a scheme for high-fidelity photonic controlled-phase gates using a Rydberg blockade in an ensemble of atoms in an optical cavity. The gate operation is obtained by first storing a photonic pulse in the ensemble and then scattering a second pulse from the cavity, resulting in a phase change depending on whether the first pulse contained a single photon. We show that the combination of a Rydberg blockade and optical cavities effectively enhances the optical nonlinearity created by the strong Rydberg interaction and makes the gate operation more robust. The resulting gate can be implemented with cavities of moderate finesse, allowing for highly efficient processing of quantum information encoded in photons. As an illustration, we show how the gate can be employed to increase the communication rate of quantum repeaters based on atomic ensembles.
We report on the realization of an all-optical transistor by mapping gate and source photons into strongly interacting Rydberg excitations with different principal quantum numbers in an ultracold atomic ensemble. We obtain a record switch contrast of 40% for a coherent gate input with mean photon number one and demonstrate attenuation of source transmission by over ten photons with a single gate photon. We use our optical transistor to demonstrate the nondestructive detection of a single Rydberg atom with a fidelity of 0.72(4).
The long-range interaction between Rydberg-excited atoms endows a medium with large optical nonlinearity. Here, we demonstrate an optical switch to operate on a single photon from an entangled photon pair under a Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency configuration. With the presence of the Rydberg blockade effect, we switch on a gate field to make the atomic medium nontransparent thereby absorbing the single photon emitted from another atomic ensemble via the spontaneous four-wave mixing process. In contrast to the case without a gate field, more than 50% of the photons sent to the switch are blocked, and finally achieve an effective single-photon switch. There are on average 1-2 gate photons per effective blockade sphere in one gate pulse. This switching effect on a single entangled photon depends on the principal quantum number and the photon number of the gate field. Our experimental progress is significant in the quantum information process especially in controlling the interaction between Rydberg atoms and entangled photon pairs.
Mapping the strong interaction between Rydberg atoms onto single photons via electromagnetically induced transparency enables manipulation of light at the single-photon level and few-photon devices such as all-optical switches and transistors operated by individual photons. Here we demonstrate experimentally that Stark-tuned Förster resonances can substantially increase this effective interaction between individual photons. This technique boosts the gain of a single-photon transistor to over 100, enhances the non-destructive detection of single Rydberg atoms to a fidelity beyond 0.8, and enables high-precision spectroscopy on Rydberg pair states. On top, we achieve a gain larger than 2 with gate photon read-out after the transistor operation. Theory models for Rydberg polariton propagation on Förster resonance and for the projection of the stored spin-wave yield excellent agreement to our data and successfully identify the main decoherence mechanism of the Rydberg transistor, paving the way towards photonic quantum gates.