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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

Correlating Photons Using the Collective Nonlinear Response of Atoms Weakly Coupled to an Optical Mode

Jürgen Volz, Adarsh S. Prasad, Jakob Hinney, Sahand Mahmoodian, Klemens Hammerer, Samuel Rind, Philipp Schneeweiß, Max Schemmer, Anders Søndberg Sørensen, Arno Rauschenbeutel

Published Jun 21, 2021• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The generation of correlated photons typically requires a highly nonlinear medium that is strongly coupled to an optical mode. Recently, significant advances have been made in this direction by strongly coupling photons to quantum emitters and exploiting the inherently nonlinear response of the latter. A number of methods have been pursued for this purpose, employing, e.g., high finesse optical cavities or strongly interacting Rydberg atoms. However, the implementation of strong and low-loss photon-photon interactions remains a challenging goal.

DOI
10.1109/cleo/europe-eqec52157.2021.9542800

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The generation of correlated photons typically requires a highly nonlinear medium that is strongly coupled to an optical mode. Recently, significant advances have been made in this direction by strongly coupling photons to quantum emitters and exploiting the inherently nonlinear response of the latter. A number of methods have been pursued for this purpose, employing, e.g., high finesse optical cavities or strongly interacting Rydberg atoms. However, the implementation of strong and low-loss photon-photon interactions remains a challenging goal.
Atom-photon interfaces are one of the building blocks of the future quantum information protocols. Accomplishing a strong interaction between the atom and the photons can be successfully done by high finesse and small mode volume cavities. However, this method requires sophisticated dielectric coatings and stabilization of the cavity against even small vibrations and small line width of those cavities impose higher input photon numbers if spontaneously emitted photons are to be used, which make it seem hard to scale up such atom-light interfaces to form quantum networks. An alternative method is to use a nearly concentric cavity, which has a strongly focused optical mode [1].
The realization of strong nonlinear interactions between individual light quanta (photons) is a long-standing goal in optical science and engineering, being of both fundamental and technological significance. We describe and demonstrate a medium that is nonlinear at the level of individual quanta, exhibiting strong absorption and phase shift for photon pairs while remaining transparent to single photons. The quantum nonlinearity is obtained by coherently coupling slowly propagating photons to strongly interacting atomic Rydberg states in a cold, dense atomic gas. Finally, we will discuss our progress towards realization of integrated quantum photonic systems, based on deterministic coupling of individual atoms and atom-like systems to photonic crystal cavities.
Typical schemes for generating correlated states of light require a highly nonlinear medium that is strongly coupled to an optical mode. However, unavoidable dissipative processes, which cause photon loss and blur nonlinear quantum effects, often impede such methods. In this talk, I will report on our experimental implementation of the opposite approach. Using a strongly dissipative, weakly coupled medium, we generate and study strongly correlated states of light. Specifically, we study the transmission of resonant light through an ensemble of non-interacting atoms that weakly couple to a guided optical mode. Dissipation removes uncorrelated photons while preferentially transmitting highly correlated photons, created through collectively enhanced nonlinear interactions. As a result, the transmitted light constitutes a strongly correlated many-body state of light, revealed in the second-order correlation function. The latter exhibits strong antibunching or bunching, depending on the optical depth of the atomic ensemble. The demonstrated mechanism opens a new avenue for generating nonclassical states of light and for exploring correlations of photons in non-equilibrium systems using a mix of nonlinear and dissipative processes.
Scalable quantum computers and quantum networks require the combination of quantum processing nodes with efficient light-matter interfaces to distribute quantum information in local or long-distance quantum networks. Neutral-atom arrays have both been coupled to Rydberg states to enable high-fidelity quantum gates in universal processing architectures, and to optical cavities to realize interfaces to photons. However, combining these two capabilities and coupling atom arrays to highly excited Rydberg states in the mode of an optical cavity has been an outstanding challenge. Here we present a novel cavity-coupled Rydberg array that achieves this long-standing goal. We prepare, detect, and control individual atoms in a scalable optical tweezer array, couple them strongly to the optical mode of a high-finesse optical cavity and excite them in a controlled way to Rydberg states. We show that high-cooperativity coupling to an optical cavity -- demonstrated via the dispersive shift of the resonance of the cavity in presence of the atoms -- and strong Rydberg interactions -- demonstrated via the collective enhancement of Rydberg coupling in the atomic array -- can be achieved in our setup at the same spatial location. Our presented experimental platform opens the path to several new directions, including the realization of quantum network nodes, quantum simulation of long-range interacting, open quantum systems and photonic-state engineering leveraging high-fidelity Rydberg control.