27 research outputs found
Exciting with quantum light
Tesis Doctoral ineÌdita leiÌda en la Universidad AutoÌnoma de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias, Departamento de FiÌsica TeoÌrica de la Materia Condensada. Fecha de lectura: 22-11-2019A two-level systemâthe idealization of an atom with only two energy levelsâis the most
fundamental quantum object. As such, it has long been at the forefront of the research in
Quantum Optics: its emission spectrum is simply a Lorentzian distribution, and the light it
produces is the most quantum that can be. The temporal distribution of the photon emission
displays a perfect antibunching, meaning that such a system will never emit two (or more)
photons simultaneously, which is consistent with the intuition that the two-level system can
only sustain a single excitation at any given time. Although these two properties have been
known for decades, it was not until the advent of the Theory of Frequency-filtered and Time-resolved
Correlations that it was observed that the perfect antibunching is not the end of the story: the
correlations between photons possess an underlying structure, which is unveiled when one
retains the information about the color of the photons. This is a consequence of the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle: measuring perfect antibunching implies an absolute knowledge about
the time at which the photons have been emitted, which in turn implies an absolute uncertainty
on their energy. Thus, keeping some information about the frequency of the emitted photons
affects the correlations between them. This means that a two-level system can be turned into
a versatile source of quantum light, providing light with a large breadth of correlation types
well beyond simply antibunching. Furthermore, when the two-level system is driven coherently
in the so-called Mollow regime (in which the two-level system becomes dressed by the laser
and the emission line is split into three), the correlations blossom: one can find every type of
statisticsâfrom antibunching to super-bunchingâprovided that one measures the photons
emitted at the adequate frequency window of the triplet. In fact, the process of filtering the
emission at the frequencies corresponding to N-photon transitions is the idea behind the
Bundler, a source of light whose emission is always in bundles of exactly N photons.
The versatility of the correlations decking the emitted light motivates the topic of this
Dissertation, in which I focus on the theoretical study of the behaviour that arises when
physical systems are driven with quantum light, i.e., with light that cannot be described through
the classical theory of electromagnetism. As the canon of excitation used in the literature is
restricted to classical sources, namely lasers and thermal reservoirs, our description starts
with the most fundamental objects that can be considered as the optical targets: a harmonic
oscillator (which represents the field for non-interacting bosonic particles) and a two-level
system (which in turn represents the field for fermionic particles). We describe which regions
of the Harmonic oscillatorâs Hilbert space can be accessed by driving the harmonic oscillator
with the light emitted by a two-level system, i.e., which quantum steady states can be realized.
Analogously, we find that the quality of the single-photon emission from a two-level system
can be enhanced when it is driven by quantum light. Once the advantages of using quantum,
rather than classical, sources of light are demonstrated with the fundamental optical targets, we
turn to the quantum excitation of more involved systems, such as the strong coupling between
a harmonic oscillator and either a two-level systemâwhose description is made through the
Jaynes-Cummings modelâor a nonlinear harmonic oscillatorâwhich can be realized in systems
of, e.g., exciton-polaritons. Here we find that the statistical versatility of the light emitted by
the Mollow triplet allows to perform Quantum Spectroscopy on these systems, thus gaining
knowledge of its internal structure and dynamics, and in particular to probe their interactions
with the least possible amount of particles: two. In the process of exciting with quantum light,
we are called to further examine the source itself. In fact, there is even the need to revisit the
concept of a single-photon source, for which we propose more robust criterion than g(2). We also
turn to toy-models of the Bundler so as to use it effectively as an optical source. We can then
xix study the advantages that one gets and shortcomings that one faces when using this source of
light to drive all the systems considered on excitation with the emission of a two-level system.
Finally, we go from the continuous to the pulsed regime of excitation, which is of higher interest
for applications and comes with its own set of fundamental questions
Quasichiral interactions between quantum emitters at the nanoscale
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by American Physical Society in Physical Review Letters on 07/02/2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.057401
The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.We present a combined classical and quantum electrodynamics description of the coupling between two circularly polarized quantum emitters held above a metal surface supporting surface plasmons. Depending on their position and their natural frequency, the emitter-emitter interactions evolve from being reciprocal to nonreciprocal, which makes the system a highly tunable platform for chiral coupling at the nanoscale. By relaxing the stringent material and geometrical constraints for chirality, we explore the interplay between coherent and dissipative coupling mechanisms in the system. Thus, we reveal a quasichiral regime in which its quantum optical properties are governed by its subradiant state, giving rise to extremely sharp spectral features and strong photon correlations
Loss of antibunching
We describe some of the main external mechanisms that lead to a loss of antibunching, i.e., that spoil the character of a given quantum light to deliver its photons separated from each other. Namely, we consider contamination by noise, a time jitter in the photon detection, and the effect of frequency filtering (or detection with finite bandwidth). The formalism to describe time jitter is derived and connected to the already existing one for frequency filtering. The emission from a two-level system under both incoherent and coherent driving is taken as a particular case of special interest. The coherent case is further separated into its vanishing- (Heitler) and high- (Mollow) driving regimes. We provide analytical solutions which, in the case of filtering, reveal an unsuspected structure in the transitions from perfect antibunching to thermal (incoherent case) or uncorrelated (coherent case) emission. The experimental observations of these basic and fundamental transitions would provide additional compelling evidence of the correctness and importance of the theory of frequency-resolved photon correlation
Impact of detuning and dephasing on a laser-corrected subnatural-linewidth single-photon source
The elastic scattering peak of a resonantly driven two-level system has been argued to provide narrow-linewidth antibunched photons. Although independent measurements of spectral width on the one hand and antibunching, on the other hand, do seem to show that this is the case, a joint measurement reveals that only one or the other of these attributes can be realised in the direct emission. We discuss a scheme which interferes the emission with a laser to produce simultaneously single photons of subnatural linewidth. In particular, we consider the effect of dephasing and of the detuning between the driving laser and/or the detector with the emitter. We find that our scheme brings such considerable improvement as compared to the standard schemes as to make it the best single-photon source in terms of all-order multi-photon suppression by several orders of magnitudes. While the scheme is particularly fragile to dephasing, its superiority holds even for subnatural-linewidth emission down to a third of the radiative lifetime
The Origin of Antibunching in Resonance Fluorescence
Epitaxial quantum dots have emerged as one of the best single-photon sources,
not only for applications in photonic quantum technologies but also for testing
fundamental properties of quantum optics. One intriguing observation in this
area is the scattering of photons with subnatural linewidth from a two-level
system under resonant continuous wave excitation. In particular, an open
question is whether these subnatural linewidth photons exhibit simultaneously
antibunching as an evidence of single-photon emission. Here, we demonstrate
that this simultaneous observation of subnatural linewidth and antibunching is
not possible with simple resonant excitation. First, we independently confirm
single-photon character and subnatural linewidth by demonstrating antibunching
in a Hanbury Brown and Twiss type setup and using high-resolution spectroscopy,
respectively. However, when filtering the coherently scattered photons with
filter bandwidths on the order of the homogeneous linewidth of the excited
state of the two-level system, the antibunching dip vanishes in the correlation
measurement. Our experimental work is consistent with recent theoretical
findings, that explain antibunching from photon-interferences between the
coherent scattering and a weak incoherent signal in a skewed squeezed state.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure