No Arabic abstract
The desire to produce high-quality single photons for applications in quantum information science has lead to renewed interest in exploring solid-state emitters in the weak excitation regime. Under these conditions it is expected that photons are coherently scattered, and so benefit from a substantial suppression of detrimental interactions between the source and its surrounding environment. Nevertheless, we demonstrate here that this reasoning is incomplete, as phonon interactions continue to play a crucial role in determining solid-state emission characteristics even for very weak excitation. We find that the sideband resulting from non-Markovian relaxation of the phonon environment is excitation strength independent. It thus leads to an intrinsic limit to the fraction of coherently scattered light and to the visibility of two-photon coalescence at weak driving, both of which are absent for atomic systems or within simpler Markovian treatments.
Photon-mediated interactions between atomic systems are the cornerstone of quantum information transfer. They can arise via coupling to a common electromagnetic mode or by quantum interference. This can manifest in cooperative light-matter coupling, yielding collective rate enhancements such as those at the heart of superradiance, or remote entanglement via measurement-induced path erasure. Here, we report coherent control of cooperative emission arising from two distant but indistinguishable solid-state emitters due to path erasure. The primary signature of cooperative emission, the emergence of bunching at zero-delay in an intensity correlation experiment, is used to characterise the indistinguishability of the emitters, their dephasing, and the degree of correlation in the joint system which can be coherently controlled. In a stark departure from a pair of uncorrelated emitters, we observe photon statistics resembling that of a weak coherent state in Hong-Ou-Mandel type interference measurements. Our experiments establish new techniques to control and characterize cooperative behaviour between matter qubits using the full quantum optics toolbox, a key stepping stone on the route to realising large-scale quantum photonic networks.
Single photons are the natural link between the nodes of a quantum network: they coherently propagate and interact with many types of quantum bits including natural and artificial atoms. Ideally, one atom should deterministically control the state of a photon and vice-versa. The interaction between free space photons and an atom is however intrinsically weak and many efforts have been dedicated to develop an efficient interface. Recently, it was shown that the propagation of light can be controlled by an atomic resonance coupled to a cavity or a single mode waveguide. Here we demonstrate that the state of a single artificial atom in a cavity can be efficiently controlled by a few-photon pulse. We study a quantum dot optimally coupled to an electrically-controlled cavity device, acting as a near optimal one-dimensional atom. By monitoring the exciton population through resonant fluorescence, we demonstrate Rabi oscillations with a $pi$-pulse of only 3.8 photons on average. The probability to flip the exciton quantum bit with a single photon Fock state is calculated to reach 55% in the same device.
We investigate theoretically the coupling of a cavity mode to a continuous distribution of emitters. We discuss the influence of the emitters inhomogeneous broadening on the existence and on the coherence properties of the polaritonic peaks. We find that their coherence depends crucially on the shape of the distribution and not only on its width. Under certain conditions the coupling to the cavity protects the polaritonic states from inhomogeneous broadening, resulting in a longer storage time for a quantum memory based on emitters ensembles. When two different ensembles of emitters are coupled to the resonator, they support a peculiar collective dark state, also very attractive for the storage of quantum information.
We apply our recently developed theory of frequency-filtered and time-resolved N-photon correlations to study the two-photon spectra of a variety of systems of increasing complexity: single mode emitters with two limiting statistics (one harmonic oscillator or a two-level system) and the various combinations that arise from their coupling. We consider both the linear and nonlinear regimes under incoherent excitation. We find that even the simplest systems display a rich dynamics of emission, not accessible by simple single photon spectroscopy. In the strong coupling regime, novel two-photon emission processes involving virtual states are revealed. Furthermore, two general results are unraveled by two-photon correlations with narrow linewidth detectors: i) filtering induced bunching and ii) breakdown of the semi-classical theory. We show how to overcome this shortcoming in a fully-quantized picture.
Strong interactions between single spins and photons are essential for quantum networks and distributed quantum computation. They provide the necessary interface for entanglement distribution, non-destructive quantum measurements, and strong photon-photon interactions. Achieving spin-photon interactions in a solid-state device could enable compact chip-integrated quantum circuits operating at gigahertz bandwidths. Many theoretical works have suggested using spins embedded in nanophotonic structures to attain this high-speed interface. These proposals exploit strong light-matter interactions to implement a quantum switch, where the spin flips the state of the photon and a photon flips the spin-state. However, such a switch has not yet been realized using a solid-state spin system. Here, we report an experimental realization of a spin-photon quantum switch using a single solid-state spin embedded in a nanophotonic cavity. We show that the spin-state strongly modulates the cavity reflection coefficient, which conditionally flips the polarization state of a reflected photon on picosecond timescales. We also demonstrate the complementary effect where a single photon reflected from the cavity coherently rotates the spin. These strong spin-photon interactions open up a promising direction for solid-state implementations of high-speed quantum networks and on-chip quantum information processors using nanophotonic devices.