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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Continuous Nondestructive Detection of Individual Photons

Kristin M. Beck, Mahdi Hosseini, Yiheng Duan, Wenlan Chen, Vladan Vuletić

Published Jun 10, 2015• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

optical cavity. The atomic component of the polariton rotates the polarization of light that is transmitted through the cavity, which we detect. We show that the system is capable of non-destructively detecting individual signal photons by measuring a second-order correlation function between the signal and detection paths of g2(0) > 5.

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optical cavity. The atomic component of the polariton rotates the polarization of light that is transmitted through the cavity, which we detect. We show that the system is capable of non-destructively detecting individual signal photons by measuring a second-order correlation function between the signal and detection paths of g2(0) > 5.
We report the continuous and partially nondestructive measurement of optical photons. For a weak light pulse traveling through a slow-light optical medium (signal), the associated atomic-excitation component is detected by another light beam (probe) with the aid of an optical cavity. We observe strong correlations of g_{sp}^{(2)}=4.4(5) between the transmitted signal and probe photons. The observed (intrinsic) conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency ranges between 13% and 1% (65% and 5%) for a signal transmission range of 2% to 35%, at a typical time resolution of 2.5 μs. The maximal observed (intrinsic) device nondestructive quantum efficiency, defined as the product of the conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency and the signal transmission, is 0.5% (2.4%). The normalized cross-correlation function violates the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, confirming the nonclassical character of the correlations.
We use an optical cavity in the regime of intermediate coupling between atom and cavity mode to detect single moving atoms. Degenerate polarization modes allow excitation of the atoms in one mode and collection of spontaneous emission in the other while keeping separate the two sources of light; we obtain a higher confidence and efficiency of detection by adding cavity-enhanced Faraday rotation. Both methods greatly benefit from coincidence detection of photons, attaining fidelities in excess of 99% in less than $1\text{ }\ensuremath{\mu}\text{s}$. Detailed studies of the second-order intensity autocorrelation function of light from the signal mode reveal evidence of antibunched photon emissions and the dynamics of single-atom transits.
We propose and analyze a scheme for photon trapping in an optical resonator coupled with two-level atoms. We show that when the cavity is excited by two identical light fields, one from each end of the cavity, the output light from the cavity is suppressed while the intracavity light field is nearmaximum due to the excitation of the polariton state of the coupled cavity and atom system. We also present methods for the direct probing of the trapped polariton state. The photon trapping is manifested by the destructive interference of the transmitted light and the incident light, which is conditioned on the presence of incoherent processes such as spontaneous decay of the atomic excitation of the polariton state. Such photon trapping is quite generic and should be observable experimentally in a variety of cavity quantum electrodynamics systems.
Deterministic photon-photon interactions are a long-standing goal in optical science. Using an atomic ensemble inside a cavity, we demonstrate the mutual cross modulation of two continuous light beams at the level of individual photons. The originally uncorrelated beams derived from independent lasers become anticorrelated, as evidenced by an equal-time cross-correlation function g^{(2)}=0.89(1), showing that one photon in one beam extinguishes a photon in the other beam with a probability of 11(1)%. With further technical improvements, our approach should enable the nondestructive continuous detection of traveling optical photons.
Detecting a single photon without absorbing it is a long-standing challenge in quantum optics. All experiments demonstrating the nondestructive detection of a photon make use of a high quality cavity. We present a cavity-free scheme for nondestructive single-photon detection. By pumping a nonlinear medium we implement an interfield Rabi oscillation which leads to a ∼π phase shift on a weak probe coherent laser field in the presence of a single signal photon without destroying the signal photon. Our cavity-free scheme operates with a fast intrinsic time scale in comparison with similar cavity-based schemes. We implement a full real-space multimode numerical analysis of the interacting photonic modes and confirm the validity of our nondestructive scheme in the multimode case.