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Annual Meeting Optical Society of America

Antibunched light source using cavity-enhanced emission

H. J. Carmichael

Published Jan 1, 1988• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Among the novel sources of nonclassical light that have recently been studied are a number of novel lasers. Conventional laser theory describes a classical stochastic field. I show that with a change in the standard operating conditions the conventional laser model produces nonclassical fields. Deviations from the classical description in standard laser theory are small by some inverse power of the threshold photon number. Operating conditions are designed to make stimulated emission dominant; thus laser cavities are good cavities that store photons and give a high threshold photon number. Low threshold photon numbers are achieved in bad cavities and most readily in a single-atom bad-cavity system. Such a system trades phase coherence for reduced intensity noise.

DOI
10.1364/oam.1988.mm5

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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE•May 6, 2013•1 citation
Among the novel sources of nonclassical light that have recently been studied are a number of novel lasers. Conventional laser theory describes a classical stochastic field. I show that with a change in the standard operating conditions the conventional laser model produces nonclassical fields. Deviations from the classical description in standard laser theory are small by some inverse power of the threshold photon number. Operating conditions are designed to make stimulated emission dominant; thus laser cavities are good cavities that store photons and give a high threshold photon number. Low threshold photon numbers are achieved in bad cavities and most readily in a single-atom bad-cavity system. Such a system trades phase coherence for reduced intensity noise.
\n\nLight-emitting atoms or material in a cavity are well known to generate thermal or coherent fields depending on, e.g., the quality of the cavity and the strength of the excitation of the emitting material. We investigate the possibilities of generating antibunched photons and nonclassical light by adding nonlinear elements in the cavity and show that it is indeed feasible. In particular, we focus on cavities with emitters formed by macroscopic many-body systems like gas of excitons in semiconductor quantum wells where different nonlinearities in the emitters and absorbers will be shown to lead to bunched, Poissonian, and antibunched photon statistics. We show that, while the single two-state system with suitable coupling parameters can produce antibunched photons, macroscopic systems need an additional nonlinearity to generate antibunching phenomenon. Our results demonstrate that a nonclassical cavity field can be generated by a conventional laser when a suitable nonlinear absorbing element is added to the cavity structure. Thus, the proposed device configuration can be manufactured using standard optoelectronic materials and processing techniques.\n
We consider a single two-level atom in an optical cavity, in which the system is driven by a coherent driving field. In the bad-cavity limit, when the cavity loss rate is taken to be large compared to the atomic decay rate and atom-field coupling, the cavity field can be adiabatically eliminated from the equations of motion for the atomic operators. The main effect of the cavity in this limit is the enhancement of spontaneous emission into the cavity mode. For this model, the second-order intensity correlation function g(2)() has been shown to exhibit photon antibunching, sub-Poissonian photon number distributions, and other nonclassical effects.1 In this paper, analytic results are presented for g(2)() for both the transmitted and fluorescent light fields when broadband squeezed light is injected into the cavity. Effects of the squeezing on nonclassical behavior is examined.
We recently reported that the transmitted light from a driven optical cavity containing a single-atom absorber shows strong nonclassical features.1 Also, Savage and Carmichael2 have shown that this single-atom system can be operated in a regime in which the transmitted light has a bimodal photon-counting distribution; as the saturation photon number is increased this bimodality develops into a single-atom version of absorptive optical bistability. We present results for the degree of second-order coherence and the spectrum of the transmitted light in the operating regime at the onset of bimodality. In this regime we can study the onset of low frequency behavior associated with transitions between the local states defined by the peaks of the bimodal distribution. Our results are calculated numerically, using a supercomputer to solve matrix element equations derived in the Fock-state basis. Our numerical approach also allows us to extend our analytical study of nonclassical effects in single-atom cavity-enhanced absorption. Our analytical results are restricted either to the bad-cavity limit1 or to weak driving fields outside this limit. We can now study how the nonclassical effects identified in these analytical calculations are changed by using finite driving fields outside the bad-cavity limit.
Although conventional lasers operate with a large number of intracavity atoms, the lasing properties of a single atom in a resonant cavity have been theoretically investigated for more than a decade. Here we report the experimental realization of such a one-atom laser operated in a regime of strong coupling. Our experiment exploits recent advances in cavity quantum electrodynamics that allow one atom to be isolated in an optical cavity in a regime for which one photon is sufficient to saturate the atomic transition. In this regime the observed characteristics of the atom-cavity system are qualitatively different from those of the familiar many atom case. Specifically, we present measurements of intracavity photon number versus pump intensity that exhibit "thresholdless" behavior, and infer that the output flux from the cavity mode exceeds that from atomic fluorescence by more than tenfold. Observations of the second-order intensity correlation function demonstrate that our one-atom laser generates manifestly nonclassical light that exhibits both photon antibunching and sub-Poissonian photon statistics.
We investigate the effects of sub-Poissonian photon statistics and photon antibunching in the light generation by a photonic-crystal one-atom laser. The physical system consists of a two-level light emitter strongly coupled to a high-quality microcavity engineered within a photonic crystal and coherently driven by a strong external laser field. This study reveals that the electromagnetic environment provided by the photonic crystal facilitates light generation characterized by pronounced sub-Poissonian photon statistics and photon antibunching, and strongly enhanced relative to that from a one-atom laser in a conventional optical cavity. The characteristics of the cavity photon statistics are fundamentally distinct from those of a corresponding microcavity in ordinary vacuum. For large discontinuities in the photon density of states between Mollow spectral components of atomic resonance fluorescence, in the good cavity regime, the photon statistics is sub-Poissonian, in contrast to the case of a conventional cavity where sub-Poissonian photon statistics is present only for a bad cavity. These results suggest the possibility of using a photonic-crystal one-atom laser as an efficient source of nonclassical light.
It has recently been shown that multiphoton absorption in cavities containing an emitter and a nonlinear mirror or a two photon absorber can be used to create antibunched photons (i.e. nonclassical light). We investigate the generation of nonclassical photon states using nonlinear laser cavities where the excitation has been modified so that it consists of short current pulses. The light fields in the studied setups are ideally formed of superpositions of zero photon and one photon states. Our goal is to study and develop single photon sources which are needed e.g. in quantum information processing and quantum computing, and fundamental quantum optical experiments. We investigate the effect of exciting the photon emitter with time dependent current pulses to provide single-photon-on-demand sources. We maximize the probability of the single photon state by optimizing the strengths of linear losses, nonlinear absorption, photon emission, and the length of the current injection pulse into the amplifier. Furthermore, we analyze the output photon statistics and waiting times using Monte Carlo simulations. This type of a setup is technologically attractive since it potentially provides room temperature realization of photon antibunching with essentially standard optoelectronic materials and processing techniques.