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arXiv:quant-ph/0308093 · Laser Physics

Angular Momentum of Photons Emitted by Atoms

Can, M. A., Özgür Çakır, A. Horzela, E. Kapuścik, Alexander A. Klyachko, A.S. Shumovsky

Published Aug 18, 2003• 2 citations
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Abstract

It is shown that the spin and orbital angular momentum of electric dipole photons have the same operator structure and may differ from each other only by spatial dependence in the very vicinity of the atom. It is shown that the photon twins created by a dipole forbidden transition can manifest the maximum entanglement with respect to the angular momentum. It is shown that the states of photons with projection of angular momentum $m=0$ are less stable than those with $m= \pm 1$.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0308093

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It is shown that the spin and orbital angular momentum of electric dipole photons have the same operator structure and may differ from each other only by spatial dependence in the very vicinity of the atom. It is shown that the photon twins created by a dipole forbidden transition can manifest the maximum entanglement with respect to the angular momentum. It is shown that the states of photons with projection of angular momentum m=0m=0m=0 are less stable than those with m=±1m= \pm 1m=±1.
The generation of paired photons entangled in the spatial degree of freedom, i.e., in orbital angular momentum, offers a convenient physical resource to investigate the nature of entanglement in a multidimensional Hilbert space with controllable dimensionality. The two main physical processes that generate pairs of photons which show correlations in orbital angular momentum are (a) spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), and (b) Raman transitions induced in atomic ensembles. One question naturally arises: what kinds of correlations exist between the orbital angular momentum of the generated photons? The answer might be different if we consider the whole quantum state of the generated photons, i.e., all possible directions where the pairs of photons can be emitted, or if we consider only a small section of the full set of directions.
Angular momentum plays an iniport,aiit role in both classical and quantum physics. Historically the angular momentum content of a photon was divided into spin or polarization angular momentum (PAM), which relies in the vectorial structure of the field, and orbital angular momentum (OAM), which is usually related with the spatial structure of the beam. It has been experimeiitally demonstrated that, under the paraxial approximation, one can manipulate independently the PAM and the OAM. While the former is a classical tool in quantum information experiments, only recently the potential of the OAM has been explored. In particular, it was demonstrated recently that the idler and signal photons produced in the process of spontaneous parametxic downconversion constitute an entangled state of OAM [l]. The experiment showed that when the beam that pumps the nonlinear crystal is an eigenstate of the OAM, the quantum state of the down converted photons can in principle be described as IQ
Light contains both spin and orbital angular momentum. Despite contributing equally to the total photonic angular momentum, these components derive from quite different parts of the electromagnetic field profile, namely its polarization and spatial variation, respectively, and therefore do not always share equal influence in light–matter interactions. With the growing interest in utilizing light’s orbital angular momentum to practice added control in the study of atomic systems, it becomes increasingly important for students and researchers to understand the subtlety involved in these interactions. In this article, we present a review of the fundamental concepts and recent experiments related to the interaction of beams containing orbital angular momentum with atoms. An emphasis is placed on understanding light’s angular momentum from the perspective of both classical waves and individual photons. We then review the application of these beams in recent experiments, namely single- and few-photon transitions, strong-field ionization, and high-harmonic generation, highlighting the role of light’s orbital angular momentum and the atom’s location within the beam profile within each case.
It is common both in the classical and quantum optics to describe the optical field as a superposition of plane waves. However, it is well known that optically active materials emit photons vastly dominantly in the electric dipole approximation. The photons emitted in the electric dipole transitions are not plane waves, but spherical photon states corresponding to eigenstates J = 1 of the total angular momentum and M = ±1 of the z component of the total angular momentum. In addition, electric dipole photons are separated from the magnetic photons by the state index η = e for electric photons in distinction to η = m for magnetic photons. In this work, we study the far-field of light that is generated when a two-dimensional matrix of atoms emits electric dipole photons and compare this far-field at large distance from the emitting matrix with a plane wave. The goal of our work is to find out if the light emitted from the electric dipole transitions carry the memory of being electric dipole photons when they are far from the emitting atoms. In particular, it is well known that a plane wave includes all angular momentum components corresponding to quantum numbers J = 1, 2, 3, …, while the far field of the emitting matrix can include only the angular momentum component J = 1. Although the two-dimensional atomic matrix used as a light source in our simulations is certainly nontrivial to fabricate, it is nevertheless fully physical and we expect that with some modifications, the conclusions from the present simulations can be generalized to atomic light sources that are more easy to realize experimentally.
We investigate two-photon entangled states using two important degrees of freedom of the electromagnetic field, namely orbital angular momentum (OAM) and spin angular momentum. For photons propagating in the same direction we apply the idea of entanglement duality and develop schemes to do entanglement sorting based on either OAM or polarization. In each case the entanglement is tested using appropriate witnesses. We finally present generalizations of these ideas to three- and four-photon entangled states.