ABSTRACT
Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in a ladder system involving a Rydberg level is known to yield giant optical nonlinearities for the probe field, even in the few-photon regime. This enhancement is due to the strong dipole-dipole interactions between Rydberg atoms and the resulting excitation blockade phenomenon. In order to study such highly correlated media, ad hoc models or low-excitation assumptions are generally used to tackle their dynamical response to optical fields. Here, we study the behavior of a cavity Rydberg-EIT setup in the nonequilibrium quantum field formalism, and we obtain analytic expressions for elastic and inelastic components of the cavity transmission spectrum, valid up to higher excitation numbers than previously achieved. This allows us to identify and interpret a polaritonic resonance structure, to our knowledge unreported so far.
ABSTRACT
Single quantum emitters such as atoms are well known as non-classical light sources with reduced noise in the intensity, capable of producing photons one by one at given times. However, the light field emitted by a single atom can exhibit much richer dynamics. A prominent example is the predicted ability of a single atom to produce quadrature-squeezed light, which has fluctuations of amplitude or phase that are below the shot-noise level. However, such squeezing is much more difficult to observe than the emission of single photons. Squeezed beams have been generated using macroscopic and mesoscopic media down to a few tens of atoms, but despite experimental efforts, single-atom squeezing has so far escaped observation. Here we generate squeezed light with a single atom in a high-finesse optical resonator. The strong coupling of the atom to the cavity field induces a genuine quantum mechanical nonlinearity, which is several orders of magnitude larger than in typical macroscopic media. This produces observable quadrature squeezing, with an excitation beam containing on average only two photons per system lifetime. In sharp contrast to the emission of single photons, the squeezed light stems from the quantum coherence of photon pairs emitted from the system. The ability of a single atom to induce strong coherent interactions between propagating photons opens up new perspectives for photonic quantum logic with single emitters.
ABSTRACT
Feedback is one of the most powerful techniques for the control of classical systems. An extension into the quantum domain is desirable as it could allow the production of non-trivial quantum states and protection against decoherence. The difficulties associated with quantum, as opposed to classical, feedback arise from the quantum measurement process-in particular the quantum projection noise and the limited measurement rate-as well as from quantum fluctuations perturbing the evolution in a driven open system. Here we demonstrate real-time feedback control of the motion of a single atom trapped in an optical cavity. Individual probe photons carrying information about the atomic position activate a dipole laser that steers the atom on timescales 70 times shorter than the atom's oscillation period in the trap. Depending on the specific implementation, the trapping time is increased by a factor of more than four owing to feedback cooling, which can remove almost all the kinetic energy of the atom in a quarter of an oscillation period. Our results show that the detected photon flux reflects the atomic motion, and thus mark a step towards the exploration of the quantum trajectory of a single atom at the standard quantum limit.
ABSTRACT
Single atoms absorb and emit light from a resonant laser beam photon by photon. We show that a single atom strongly coupled to an optical cavity can absorb and emit resonant photons in pairs. The effect is observed in a photon correlation experiment on the light transmitted through the cavity. We find that the atom-cavity system transforms a random stream of input photons into a correlated stream of output photons, thereby acting as a two-photon gateway. The phenomenon has its origin in the quantum anharmonicity of the energy structure of the atom-cavity system. Future applications could include the controlled interaction of two photons by means of one atom.
