Single-Photon shaping and phase control

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• Axel Kuhn (Oxford University)
• Monday 07 November 2011, 15:30-17:00
• Rutherford building, Seminar Room B.

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Single-Photon Shaping and Phase Control

Axel Kuhn University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PU , United Kingdom

We investigate light-matter interfaces for quantum networking based on vacuum-stimulated rapid adiabatic passage in coupled atom-cavity systems [1-4]. Our recent results show that 87Rb atoms crossing a cavity in free flight provide a unique way of deterministically generating a stream of single photons of small bandwidth [5]. The atoms are injected into the cavity with an atomic fountain, which gives rise to atom-cavity interaction times of up to 0.5 ms. With a suitably tailored driving laser pulse, the temporal shape and phase evolution of the photons can be controlled arbitrarily [2]. This is monitored with a two-photon interference experiment of the Hong-Ou-Mandel type. The high repetition rate and efficiency of our deterministic photon source pave the way to N-photon LOQC experiments, with the phase and shape control allowing for the encoding of any possible qubit superposition state in photonic time bins. Based on the successful photon generation, we also discuss inversion of the process to absorbs a single impinging photon of arbitrary shape with a probability close to unity. To do so, we analytically derive the shape of the driving pulse required to maintain impedance matching of the cavity to the incoming photonic wavepacket throughout its whole duration [4]. We furthermore report on the control of trapped atoms with optical tweezers [6]. This new technique allows handling many atoms independently, and therefore paves the way to QIP with scalable atomic arrays.

[1] A. Kuhn and D. Ljunggren, “Cavity-based single-photon sources,” Contemporary Physics 51, 289 (2010) [2] G.S. Vasilev, D. Ljunggren, and A. Kuhn, “Single-photons made-to-measure,” New Journal of Physics 12, 063024 (2010) [3] M. Himsworth, P.B.R. Nisbet, J. Dilley, G. Langfahl-Klabes, and A. Kuhn, “EIT-based quantum memory for single photons from cavity-QED,” Appl. Phys. B 103 , 579-589 (2011) [4] J. Dilley, P.B.R. Nisbet, B.W. Shore, and A. Kuhn, “Cavity-based single-atom quantum memory,” submitted, arXiv:1105:1699 [quant-ph]

[6] L. Brandt, C. Muldoon, T. Thiele, J. Dong, E. Brainis, and A. Kuhn, “Spatial light modulators for the manipulation of individual atoms,” Appl. Phys. B 102 , 443-450 (2011)

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