Nondestructive Detection of an Optical Photon

Mahdi Hosseini, Kristin M. Beck, Yiheng Duan +2 more

We nondestructively observe individual optical photons (signal photons) in real time as they propagate through a slow-light medium. The nondestructive measurement is accomplished with another light beam that detects the atomic-excitation component of the slow signal photons.

Yan Liang, Heping Zeng

Keyu Xia, Mattias Johnsson, P. L. Knight +1 more

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.

Mahdi Hosseini, Kristin M. Beck, Yiheng Duan +2 more

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.

Serge Rosenblum, Orel Bechler, Itay Shomroni +3 more