Deterministic photon-emitter coupling in chiral photonic circuits.

By I. Söllner, Sahand Mahmoodian, S. L. Hansen, L. Midolo, A. Javadi, G. Kiršanskė, T. Pregnolato, H. El-Ella, E. H. Lee, J. Song and 2 more. Nature Nanotechnology, 2014

605 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Engineering photon emission and scattering is central to modern photonics applications ranging from light harvesting to quantum-information processing. To this end, nanophotonic waveguides are well suited as they confine photons to a one-dimensional geometry and thereby increase the light-matter interaction. In a regular waveguide, a quantum emitter interacts equally with photons in either of the two propagation directions. This symmetry is violated in nanophotonic structures in which non-transversal local electric-field components imply that photon emission and scattering may become directional. Here we show that the helicity of the optical transition of a quantum emitter determines the direction of single-photon emission in a specially engineered photonic-crystal waveguide. We observe single-photon emission into the waveguide with a directionality that exceeds 90% under conditions in which practically all the emitted photons are coupled to the waveguide. The chiral light-matter interaction enables deterministic and highly directional photon emission for experimentally achievable on-chip non-reciprocal photonic elements. These may serve as key building blocks for single-photon optical diodes, transistors and deterministic quantum gates. Furthermore, chiral photonic circuits allow the dissipative preparation of entangled states of multiple emitters for experimentally achievable parameters, may lead to novel topological photon states and could be applied for directional steering of light.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/13ab447452fe75fd2b1b06e454902018bcbaf599

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Citations in the corpus

Valley-polarized exciton–polaritons in a monolayer semiconductor (2017, background): “[14] Immo Söllner, Sahand Mahmoodian, Sofie Lindskov Hansen, Leonardo Midolo, Alisa Javadi, Gabija Kiršanskė, Tommaso Pregnolato, Haitham El-Ella, Eun Hye Lee, Jin Dong Song, Søren Stobbe, and Peter Lodahl, “Deterministic photon-emitter coupling in chiral photonic circuits,” Nat Nano 10, 775–778 (20”
Atom-light interactions in quasi-one-dimensional nanostructures: A Green's-function perspective (2016, background): “, nonsymmetric permittivity tensors), although it does in principle cover the interesting case of chiral atom-light interactions [54, 55], where the time-reversal symmetry breaking is due to the atomic states.”
Quantum matter built from nanoscopic lattices of atoms and photons (2018, methodology): “…of atomic emission into the guided modes of nanofibers is small, Γ1D=Γ0 < 0.1 (Mitsch et al., 2014), novel PCW designs coupled to quantum dots have achieved both high yield Γ1D=Γ0 ≫ 1 and directional β factor βdir ≈ 98% (Sollner et al., 2015), defined as βdir ¼ max½ΓR;ΓL =ðΓR þ ΓL þ Γ0Þ.”
Topological photonics (2018, background): “…of systems, including metal surfaces (Lee et al., 2012; Rodríguez-Fortuño et al., 2013; O’Connor et al., 2014), optical nanofibers (Mitsch et al., 2014; Petersen, Volz, and Rauschenbeutel, 2014; Sayrin et al., 2015), and waveguides (Le Feber, Rotenberg, and Kuipers, 2015; Söllner et al., 2015).”
On-demand directional microwave photon emission using waveguide quantum electrodynamics (2022, background): “[5] Immo Söllner, Sahand Mahmoodian, Sofie Lindskov Hansen, Leonardo Midolo, Alisa Javadi, Gabija Kiršanskė, Tommaso Pregnolato, Haitham El-Ella, Eun Hye Lee, Jin Dong Song, Søren Stobbe, and Peter Lodahl, “Deterministic photon–emitter coupling in chiral photonic circuits,” Nature Nanotechnology 10,”
Dynamics of Many-Body Photon Bound States in Chiral Waveguide QED (2019, background): “Optical quantum dots have demonstrated chiral coupling between a single emitter and a waveguide [47,48], while coupling between two diamond impurity centers and a photonic nanostructure has been achieved [49].”