Turning a molecule into a coherent two-level quantum system

By Daqing Wang, H. Kelkar, D. Martín-Cano, D. Rattenbacher, A. Shkarin, T. Utikal, S. Götzinger, Vahid Sandoghdar. Nature Physics, 2018

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The use of molecules in quantum optical applications has been hampered by incoherent internal vibrations and other phononic interactions with their environment. Here we show that an organic molecule placed into an optical microcavity behaves as a coherent two-level quantum system. This allows the observation of 99% extinction of a laser beam by a single molecule, saturation with less than 0.5 photons and non-classical generation of few-photons super-bunched light. Furthermore, we demonstrate efficient interaction of the molecule–microcavity system with single photons generated by a second molecule in a distant laboratory. Our achievements represent an important step towards linear and nonlinear quantum photonic circuits based on organic platforms. A molecule placed in an optical microcavity behaves as a model two-level quantum system, as demonstrated via laser extinction and interaction with single photons.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8493510d812e72b5c0e9612709706199f2f57a36

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Roadmap on quantum light spectroscopy (2020, background): “Among the possible quantum materials to explore these ideas, molecules have some decisive advantages [100, 101, 105].”