Perfect excitation of a matter qubit by a single photon in free space

By Magdalena Stobi'nska, G. Alber, Gerd Leuchs. 2008

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose a scheme for perfect excitation of a single two-level atom by a single photon in free space. The photon state has to match the time reversed photon state originating from spontaneous decay of a two-level system. Here, we discuss its experimental preparation. The state is characterized by a particular asymmetric exponentially shaped temporal profile. Any deviations from this ideal state limit the maximum absorption. Although perfect excitation requires an infinite amount of time, we demonstrate that there is a class of initial one-photon quantum states which can achieve almost perfect absorption even for a finite interaction time. Our results pave the way for realizing perfect coupling between flying and stationary qubits in free space thus opening a possibility for building scalable quantum networks.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a2021de9b9ff28f2974631021c27d654bf9580af

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Ion traps with enhanced optical and physical access (2008, background): “Conversely, light sent onto the ion in a dipolar pattern would provide a near-perfect atom-to-photon coupling to a linear dipole transition, possibly working down to the single-photon leve”