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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Pacific Rim (CLEO-PR)

Trapping a Free-propagating Single-photon into an Atomic Ensemble as a Quantum Stationary Light Pulse

U-Shin Kim, Yong Sup Ihn, Chung-Hyun Lee, Yoon-Ho Kim

Published Aug 4, 2024• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report the first experimental demonstration of trapping a free-propagating single-photon into a cold atomic ensemble. Also, we observe that the quantum properties of the single-photon state are preserved during the trapping process. © 2024 The Author(s)
DOI
10.1109/cleo-pr60912.2024.10676908

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Photons can be trapped into an atomic ensemble while maintaining its photonic part, resulting a strong confinement of photons in the ensemble. It leads potential applications about strong photon-photon interactions without a strong coupling between light and atoms based on cavity [1]. Recently, the observation for single stationary dark-state polariton has been reported [2], yet the trapping of single photon into the ensemble has not been reported so far. Here, we present the first experimental demonstration for the trapping of free-propagating single photon into an atomic ensemble.
Efficient photon–photon interaction is one of the key elements for realizing quantum information processing. The interaction, however, must often be mediated through an atomic medium due to the bosonic nature of photons, and the interaction time, which is critically linked to the efficiency, depends on the properties of the atom–photon interaction. While the electromagnetically induced transparency effect does offer the possibility of photonic quantum memory, it does not enhance the interaction time as it fully maps the photonic state to an atomic state. The stationary light pulse (SLP) effect, on the contrary, traps the photonic state inside an atomic medium with zero group velocity, opening up the possibility of enhanced interaction time. In this work, we report the first experimental demonstration of trapping a free-propagating single-photon into a cold atomic ensemble via the quantum SLP (QSLP) process. We conclusively show that the quantum properties of the single-photon state are preserved well during the QSLP process. Our work paves the way for new approaches for efficient photon–photon interactions, exotic photonic states, and many-body simulations in photonic systems.
The stationary light pulse (SLP) refers to a zero-group-velocity optical pulse in an atomic ensemble prepared by two counter-propagating driving fields. Despite the uniqueness of an optical pulse trapped within an atomic medium without a cavity, observations of SLP so far have been limited to trapping a single optical pulse due to the stringent SLP phase-matching condition, and this has severely hindered the development of SLP-based applications. Here, we first show theoretically that the SLP process in fact supports two phase-matching conditions and we then utilize the result to experimentally demonstrate simultaneous SLP trapping of two optical pulses for the duration from0.8 μs0.8\ \mu \mathsf{s}0.8 μsto2.0 μs2.0\ \mu \mathsf{s}2.0 μs. The characteristic dissipation time, obtained by the release efficiency measurement, is1.22 μs1.22\ \mu \mathsf{s}1.22 μs, which corresponds to an effective Q-factor of2.9×1092.9\times 10^{9}2.9×109[1]. As our SLP system reports a large effective N-atom cooperativity of8×1068\times 10^{6}8×106, our work is expected to bring forth interesting SLP-based applications, such as, efficient photon-photon interaction, spatially multi-mode coherent quantum memory, creation of exotic photonic gas states, etc.