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arXiv:quant-ph/0406035 · Physical Review Letters

Transition from Antibunching to Bunching in Cavity QED

Markus Hennrich, Axel Kuhn, Gerhard Rempe

Published Feb 10, 2005• 121 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The photon statistics of the light emitted from an atomic ensemble into a single field mode of an optical cavity is investigated as a function of the number of atoms. The light is produced in a Raman transition driven by a pump laser and the cavity vacuum, and a recycling laser is employed to repeat this process continuously. For weak driving, a smooth transition from antibunching to bunching is found for about one intracavity atom. Remarkably, the bunching peak develops within the antibunching dip. The observed behavior is well explained by a model describing an ensemble of independent emitters.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.94.053604

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Being bosons, photons like to group together, with the behavior of photon bunching described as an attribute of classical light. At the other extreme, photons emitted by a single emitter are expected to antibunch, trickling out of the emitter one at a time. Although bunching and antibunching are well established behaviors of classical and nonclassical light, respectively, the transition between the two has not been observed. It is expected that as the number of emitters is increased, a smooth transition should occur. Using a high-quality cavity into which they can place a variable number of atoms, Hennrich et al. show that they can probe the transition systematically as the number of emitters (atoms in the cavity) is gradually increased. They observe that the antibunching behavior disappears when the average number of atoms in the cavity is one, and they are able to explain the experimental data well if the emitters are assumed to form an independent ensemble. — ISO
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.
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 have measured the second-order correlation function of the cavity-QED microlaser output and observed a transition from photon bunching to antibunching with increasing average number of intracavity atoms. The observed correlation times and the transition from super- to sub-Poisson photon statistics can be well described by gain-loss feedback or enhanced-reduced restoring action against fluctuations in photon number in the context of a quantum microlaser theory and a photon rate equation picture. However, the theory predicts a degree of antibunching several times larger than that observed, which may indicate the inadequacy of its treatment of atomic velocity distributions.
Photon statistics divides light sources into three different categories, characterized by bunched, antibunched, or uncorrelated photon arrival times. Single atoms, ions, molecules, or solid state emitters display antibunching of photons, while classical thermal sources exhibit photon bunching. Here we demonstrate a light source in free space, where the photon statistics depends on the direction of observation, undergoing a continuous crossover between photon bunching and antibunching. We employ two trapped ions, observe their fluorescence under continuous laser light excitation, and record spatially resolved the autocorrelation function g^{(2)}(τ) with a movable Hanbury Brown and Twiss detector. Varying the detector position we find a minimum value for antibunching, g^{(2)}(0)=0.60(5) and a maximum of g^{(2)}(0)=1.46(8) for bunching, demonstrating that this source radiates fundamentally different types of light alike. The observed variation of the autocorrelation function is understood in the Dicke model from which the observed maximum and minimum values can be modeled, taking independently measured experimental parameters into account.
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 that 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.