A single-photon transistor using nanoscale surface plasmons

By Darrick E. Chang, Anders Søndberg Sørensen, E. Demler, Mikhail D. Lukin. 2007

1,125 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Photons rarely interact—which makes it challenging to build all-optical devices in which one light signal controls another. Even in nonlinear optical media, in which two beams can interact because of their influence on the medium’s refractive index, this interaction is weak at low light levels. Here, we propose a novel approach to realizing strong nonlinear interactions at the single-photon level, by exploiting the strong coupling between individual optical emitters and propagating surface plasmons confined to a conducting nanowire. We show that this system can act as a nonlinear two-photon switch for incident photons propagating along the nanowire, which can be coherently controlled using conventional quantum-optical techniques. Furthermore, we discuss how the interaction can be tailored to create a single-photon transistor, where the presence (or absence) of a single incident photon in a ‘gate’ field is sufficient to allow (or prevent) the propagation of subsequent ‘signal’ photons along the wire.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3df226ccbdc97fe494520a8d7f6a6588fbe81001

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Citations in the corpus

Colloquium: Strongly interacting photons in one-dimensional continuum (2016, background): “Building on the work of Abdumalikov et al. (2010), Hoi et al. (2011) demonstrated that a driven three-level emitter (3LE) strongly coupled to a 1D continuum can act as an efficient single-photon router (Chang et al., 2007; Neumeier et al., 2013; Shomroni et al., 2014).”
Crystallization of strongly interacting photons in a nonlinear optical fibre (2007, background): “Interest in this regime stems from the observation that interaction with basic two-level atomic systems leads to photon bunching, since it is easier for many photons to pass through an atom without being absorbed [24].”
Nonlinear spectroscopy of photons bound to one atom (2008, background): “It provides a photon–photon interaction by means of one atom, and constitutes a step towards a two-photon gateway or a single-photon transisto”
Quantum matter built from nanoscopic lattices of atoms and photons (2018, background): “This essentially realizes quantum electrodynamics in propagating 1D channels, for which rich theoretical phenomena have been predicted (Shen and Fan, 2005; Chang et al., 2007; Ramos et al., 2014; Ringel, Pletyukhov, and Gritsev, 2014) but thus far largely lacks experimental realization.”