Quantum nature of a strongly coupled single quantum dot–cavity system

By K. Hennessy, Antonio Badolato, M. Winger, D. Gerace, M. Atatüre, S. Gulde, S. Fält, E. Hu, A. Imamoğlu. Nature, 2006

1,619 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) studies the interaction between a quantum emitter and a single radiation-field mode. When an atom is strongly coupled to a cavity mode, it is possible to realize important quantum information processing tasks, such as controlled coherent coupling and entanglement of distinguishable quantum systems. Realizing these tasks in the solid state is clearly desirable, and coupling semiconductor self-assembled quantum dots to monolithic optical cavities is a promising route to this end. However, validating the efficacy of quantum dots in quantum information applications requires confirmation of the quantum nature of the quantum-dot–cavity system in the strong-coupling regime. Here we find such confirmation by observing quantum correlations in photoluminescence from a photonic crystal nanocavity interacting with one, and only one, quantum dot located precisely at the cavity electric field maximum. When off-resonance, photon emission from the cavity mode and quantum-dot excitons is anticorrelated at the level of single quanta, proving that the mode is driven solely by the quantum dot despite an energy mismatch between cavity and excitons. When tuned to resonance, the exciton and cavity enter the strong-coupling regime of cavity QED and the quantum-dot exciton lifetime reduces by a factor of 145. The generated photon stream becomes antibunched, proving that the strongly coupled exciton/photon system is in the quantum regime. Our observations unequivocally show that quantum information tasks are achievable in solid-state cavity QED.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9413fd446c976fa260e2ac2c421ac1cb4ca5526

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Quantum many‐body phenomena in coupled cavity arrays (2008, background): “Recent experimental progress in the fabrication of microcavity arrays and the realisation of the quantum regime in the interaction of atomic-like structures and quantised electromagnetic modes inside those [57,58,59,60,61,62, 63,64] opened up the possibility of using them as quantum simulators of ma”
Spontaneous-emission control by photonic crystals and nanocavities (2007, background): “, and light-emission control by using the photonic nanocavities has progressed greatl”
Electrical control of spontaneous emission and strong coupling for a single quantum dot (2008, methodology): “revealed by photon cross-correlation spectroscopy and clearly plays a role in these experiments[15, 17, 19].”
Photonic quantum technologies (2009, background): “However, the field of solid-state cavity QED has recently seen rapid progress, including the demonstration of the strong coupling regime in photoluminescenc”