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arXiv:quant-ph/0406034 · New Journal of Physics

Photon statistics of a non-stationary periodically driven single-photon source

M Hennrich, T Legero, Axel Kuhn, G Rempe

Published Jul 30, 2004• 40 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the photon statistics of a single-photon source that operates under non-stationary conditions. The photons are emitted by shining a periodic sequence of laser pulses on single atoms falling randomly through a high-finesse optical cavity. Strong antibunching is found in the intensity correlation of the emitted light, demonstrating that a single atom emits photons one at a time. However, the number of atoms interacting with the cavity follows a Poissonian statistics so that, on average, no sub-Poissonian photon statistics is obtained, unless the measurement is conditioned on the presence of single atoms.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/6/1/086

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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.
Photons spontaneously emitted from single atoms are necessarily antibunched in time. The statistics of the photon time record, however, can show sub-Poissonian or even super-Poissonian statistics and depend strongly on the time interval used for analysis. In this work we have analyzed photon arrival times from resonantly excited barium atoms in an atomic beam observed under single-atom conditions. The time-interval dependence of photon statistics is presented, showing the connection between antibunching and sub-Poissonian statistics (at times comparable to the spontaneous-decay lifetime of the atom) as well as the evolution of the statistics in the long-time limit.
We explore the photon statistics of light emitted from a system comprising a single four--level atom strongly coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity mode which is driven by a coherent laser field. In the weak driving regime this system is found to exhibit a photon blockade effect. For intermediate driving strengths we find a sudden change in the photon statistics of the light emitted from the cavity. Photon antibunching switches to photon bunching over a very narrow range of intracavity photon number. It is proven that this sudden change in photon statistics occurs due to the existence of robust quantum interference of transitions between the dressed states of the atom-cavity system. Furthermore, it is shown that the strong photon bunching is a nonclassical effect for certain values of driving field strength, violating classical inequalities for field correlations.