Strongly correlated photons on a chip

By A. Reinhard, T. Volz, M. Winger, Antonio Badolato, K. Hennessy, E. Hu, A. Imamoğlu. Nature Photonics, 2011

330 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Optical nonlinearities at the single-photon level are key ingredients for future photonic quantum technologies1. Prime candidates for the realization of the strong photon–photon interactions necessary for implementing quantum information processing tasks2, as well as for studying strongly correlated photons3,4,5,6 in an integrated photonic device setting, are quantum dots embedded in photonic-crystal nanocavities. Here, we report strong quantum correlations between photons on picosecond timescales. We observe (i) photon antibunching upon resonant excitation of the lowest-energy polariton state, proving that the first cavity photon blocks the subsequent injection events, and (ii) photon bunching when the laser field is in two-photon resonance with the polariton eigenstates of the second Jaynes–Cummings manifold7,8, demonstrating that two photons at this colour are more likely to be injected into the cavity jointly than they would otherwise. Together, these results demonstrate unprecedented strong single-photon nonlinearities, paving the way for the realization of a quantum optical Josephson interferometer9 or a single-photon transistor10. Researchers observe a continuous change in photon correlations from strong antibunching to bunching by tuning either the probe laser or the cavity mode frequency. These results, which demonstrate unprecedented strong single-photon nonlinearities in quantum dot cavity system, are explained by the photon blockade and tunnelling in the anharmonic Jaynes–Cummings model.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cfcc95695c5f35af4fde3fd0e22824580ec0ff4e

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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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].”
Cavity-based quantum networks with single atoms and optical photons (2014, background): “…nonlinearities have been investigated in several experiments with atoms near whispering-gallery mode resonators (Aoki et al., 2009; Dayan et al., 2008; O’Shea et al., 2013; Volz et al., 2014), and with atoms or quantum dots in photonic crystal cavities (Reinhard et al., 2012; Tiecke et al., 2014).”
Quantum nonlinear optics with single photons enabled by strongly interacting atoms (2012, background): “τc is estimated using the single-atom EIT linewidths (γ EIT , γ 4 EIT , γ ◦ EIT , γ EIT ) = 2π× (6-16,18-26,29-36,50) MHz, and varies from 60 to 330 ns.”