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Optics Letters

Biphoton generation enhanced by nonlocal nonlinearity via Rydberg interactions

Hui-Min Zhao, Xiaojun Zhang, M. Artoni, Giuseppe Carlo La Rocca, Jin‐Hui Wu

Published Sep 11, 2023• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Strongly correlated Stokes and anti-Stokes photon pairs (biphotons) exhibiting very large generation rates and spectral brightnesses could be attained at extremely low pump powers and optical depths. This is realized via spontaneous four-wave mixing in cold atoms with enhanced nonlocal (Rydberg) optical nonlinearities and prepared into a dark state with a large population imbalance. The scheme works with all light fields on resonance yet with negligible linear absorption and Raman gain.

DOI
10.1364/ol.501557

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Strongly correlated Stokes and anti-Stokes photon pairs (biphotons) exhibiting very large generation rates and spectral brightnesses could be attained at extremely low pump powers and optical depths. This is realized via spontaneous four-wave mixing in cold atoms with enhanced nonlocal (Rydberg) optical nonlinearities and prepared into a dark state with a large population imbalance. The scheme works with all light fields on resonance yet with negligible linear absorption and Raman gain.
Tunable Rydberg interactions in cold atoms can be used to generate strongly correlated photon pairs through a spontaneous four-wave-mixing process in which all driving fields are allowed to work on resonance. The scheme relies on electromagnetically induced transparency and an imbalanced dark state with most atoms trapped in a ground state and a weakly populated Rydberg state. We show in particular that the combination of these two effects results in negligible linear absorption and Raman gain at the Stokes and anti-Stokes frequencies of generated photon pairs, while the nonlocal (Rydberg) nonlinearities contribute significantly to the enhancement of photon-pair generation rates and cross correlations at very low pump strengths and optical depths.
We theoretically investigate the coherent manipulation of biphoton generation via spontaneous four-wave mixing in a cavity-QED system with a single atom. The atom is driven by pumping, coupling, and driving fields, and the generation of the Stokes and anti-Stokes photons are enhanced by two cavities. By solving the master equation in the steady state, we analyze the spectral brightness, as well as the degree of the auto-correlation and cross-correlation. Our results show that when the pumping and driving fields are in two-photon resonance, the dark state established between the ground and Rydberg states. efficiently enhances the controllability of the driving field over the biphoton generation and the quantum statistics. In contrast, under large two-photon detuning, the control capability of the driving field is significantly reduced. The coupling field, which directly relates to the electromagnetically induced transparency, modifies the linewidth of the biphoton, while the atom-cavity coupling strength only changes the brightness without affecting the linewidth.
A single atom undergoing spontaneous four-wave mixing near a chiral waveguide can efficiently channel an emitted Stokes-anti-Stokes photon pair into two tightly confined waveguide modes, yielding thus enhanced biphoton generation without requiring loss suppression or stringent phase matching. We develop a perturbative treatment, valid for a four-level atomic system under experimentally realistic conditions, to explain physical origins and clarify relevant constraints of such an enhancement determined by the interplay of atomic decay rates toward guided and unguided modes. Besides achieving optimal generation rates equivalent to a cold atomic ensemble hundreds of micrometers long in free space, our biphoton source naturally fulfills key requirements for next-generation on-chip quantum light sources, namely low-loss operation, robustness, compactness, and scalability.
Generating nonclassical light offers a benchmark tool for fundamental research and potential applications in quantum optics. Conventionally, it has become a standard technique to produce nonclassical light through the nonlinear optical processes occurring in nonlinear crystals. We describe this process using cold atomic-gas media to generate such nonclassical light, especially focusing on narrowband biphoton generation. Compared with the standard procedure the new biphoton source has such properties as long coherence time, long coherence length, high spectral brightness, and high conversion efficiency. Although there exist two methodologies describing the physical process, we concentrate on the theoretical aspect of the entangled two-photon state produced from the four-wave mixing in a multilevel atomic ensemble using perturbation theory. We show that both linear and nonlinear optical responses to the generated fields play an important role in determining the biphoton waveform and, consequently, on the two-photon temporal correlation. There are two characteristic regimes determined by whether the linear or nonlinear coherence time is dominant. In addition, our model provides a clear physical picture that brings insight into understanding biphoton optics with this new source. We apply our model to recent work on generating narrowband (and even subnatural linewidth) paired photons using the technique of electromagnetically induced transparency and slow-light effect in cold atoms and find good agreement with experimental results.
Abstract Nonclassical photon sources of high brightness are key components of quantum communication technologies. We here demonstrate the generation of narrowband, nonclassical photon pairs by employing spontaneous four-wave mixing in an optically-dense ensemble of cold atoms within a hollow-core fiber. The brightness of our source approaches the limit of achievable generated spectral brightness at which successive photon pairs start to overlap in time. For a generated spectral brightness per pump power of up to 2 × 10 9 pairs/(s MHz mW) we observe nonclassical correlations at pump powers below 100 nW and a narrow bandwidth of 2 π × 6.5 MHz. In this regime we demonstrate that our source can be used as a heralded single-photon source. By further increasing the brightness we enter the regime where successive photon pairs start to overlap in time and the cross-correlation approaches a limit corresponding to thermal statistics. Our approach of combining the advantages of atomic ensembles and waveguide environments is an important step toward photonic quantum networks of ensemble-based elements.