Quantum nonlinear optics with single photons enabled by strongly interacting atoms

By T. Peyronel, Ofer Firstenberg, Qi-Yu Liang, Sebastian Hofferberth, Alexey V. Gorshkov, Thomas Pohl, Mikhail D. Lukin, V. Vuleti'c. Nature, 2012

727 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The realization of strong nonlinear interactions between individual light quanta (photons) is a long-standing goal in optical science and engineering, being of both fundamental and technological significance. In conventional optical materials, the nonlinearity at light powers corresponding to single photons is negligibly weak. Here we demonstrate a medium that is nonlinear at the level of individual quanta, exhibiting strong absorption of photon pairs while remaining transparent to single photons. The quantum nonlinearity is obtained by coherently coupling slowly propagating photons to strongly interacting atomic Rydberg states in a cold, dense atomic gas. Our approach paves the way for quantum-by-quantum control of light fields, including single-photon switching, all-optical deterministic quantum logic and the realization of strongly correlated many-body states of light.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e90110c0e2c0812851a3acf0f9b1a48044c6a4c

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Citations in the corpus

Dynamics of Many-Body Photon Bound States in Chiral Waveguide QED (2019, methodology): “Systems of this kind have thus far been used to propose or demonstrate the generation of states of photons with strong two- or three-body correlations [10–20].”
Tunable-range, photon-mediated atomic interactions in multimode cavity QED (2017, background): “For example, exotic nonlinear optical properties arise in cavity systems with atom-mediated photon-photon interactions [2].”
Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, unknown): “using Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency [97,98,99,100].”
Nonlinear optical signals and spectroscopy with quantum light (2016, background): “…2001; Schwartz et al., 2011; Walther et al., 2006), the enhancement of the medium’s nonlinearity by additional driving fields (Chen et al., 2013; Peyronel et al., 2012), large dipoles in highly excited Rdberg states (Gorniaczyk et al., 2014; He et al., 2014), molecular design (Castet et al.,…”
Topological photonics (2018, background): “…using polaritons in gases of coherently driven atoms with electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in Rydberg states (Gorshkov et al., 2011; Peyronel et al., 2012; Firstenberg et al., 2013)–the so-called Rydberg polaritons–or circuit-QED devices, where microwave cavity photons are strongly…”
Exciton-plasmon coupling interactions: from principle to applications (2017, methodology): “According to the Weisskopf-Wigner theory, there is an interaction that exists between μ and γ 1 (also known as spontaneous emissivity) [105].”
Colloquium: Strongly interacting photons in one-dimensional continuum (2016, methodology): “The dissipative interaction at ∆ = 0 was observed by Peyronel et al. (2012) at an average level of less than one photon in the medium.”