No Arabic abstract
Giant optical Faraday rotation (GFR) and giant optical circular birefringence (GCB) induced by a single quantum-dot spin in an optical microcavity can be regarded as linear effects in the weak-excitation approximation if the input field lies in the low-power limit [Hu et al, Phys.Rev. B {bf 78}, 085307(2008) and ibid {bf 80}, 205326(2009)]. In this work, we investigate the transition from the weak-excitation approximation moving into the saturation regime comparing a semiclassical approximation with the numerical results from a quantum optics toolbox [S.M. Tan, J. Opt. B {bf 1}, 424 (1999)]. We find that the GFR and GCB around the cavity resonance in the strong coupling regime are input-field independent at intermediate powers and can be well described by the semiclassical approximation. Those associated with the dressed state resonances in the strong coupling regime or merging with the cavity resonance in the Purcell regime are sensitive to input field at intermediate powers, and cannot be well described by the semiclassical approximation due to the quantum dot saturation. As the GFR and GCB around the cavity resonance are relatively immune to the saturation effects, the rapid read out of single electron spins can be carried out with coherent state and other statistically fluctuating light fields. This also shows that high speed quantum entangling gates, robust against input power variations, can be built exploiting these linear effects.
Developing future quantum communication may rely on the ability to engineer cavity-mediated interactions between photons and solid-state artificial atoms, in a deterministic way. Here, we report a set of technological and experimental developments for the deterministic coupling between the optical mode of a micropillar cavity and a quantum dot trion transition. We first identify a charged transition through in-plane magnetic field spectroscopy, and then tune the optical cavity mode to its energy via in-situ lithography. In addition, we design an asymmetric tunneling barrier to allow the optical trapping of the charge, assisted by a quasi-resonant pumping scheme, in order to control its occupation probability. We evaluate the generation of a positively-charged quantum dot through second order auto-correlation measurements of its resonance fluorescence, and the quality of light-matter interaction for these spin-photon interfaces is assessed by measuring the performance of the device as a single-photon source.
The electronic spin degrees of freedom in semiconductors typically have decoherence times that are several orders of magnitude longer than other relevant timescales. A solid-state quantum computer based on localized electron spins as qubits is therefore of potential interest. Here, a scheme that realizes controlled interactions between two distant quantum dot spins is proposed. The effective long-range interaction is mediated by the vacuum field of a high finesse microcavity. By using conduction-band-hole Raman transitions induced by classical laser fields and the cavity-mode, parallel controlled-not operations and arbitrary single qubit rotations can be realized. Optical techniques can also be used to measure the spin-state of each quantum dot.
We propose a quantum metrology scheme in a cavity QED setup to achieve the Heisenberg limit. In our scheme, a series of identical two-level atoms randomly pass through and interact with a dissipative single-mode cavity. Different from the entanglement based Heisenberg limit metrology scheme, we do not need to prepare the atomic entangled states before they enter into the cavity. We show that the initial atomic coherence will induce an effective driving to the cavity field, whose steady state is an incoherent superposition of orthogonal states, with the superposition probabilities being dependent on the atom-cavity coupling strength. By measuring the average photon number of the cavity in the steady state, we demonstrate that the root-mean-square of the fluctuation of the atom-cavity coupling strength is proportional to $1/N_c^2$ ($N_c$ is the effective atom number interacting with the photon in the cavity during its lifetime). It implies that we have achieved the Heisenberg limit in our quantum metrology process. We also discuss the experimental feasibility of our theoretical proposal. Our findings may find potential applications in quantum metrology technology.
The strong-coupling regime of cavity-quantum-electrodynamics (cQED) represents light-matter interaction at the fully quantum level. Adding a single photon shifts the resonance frequencies, a profound nonlinearity. cQED is a test-bed of quantum optics and the basis of photon-photon and atom-atom entangling gates. At microwave frequencies, success in cQED has had a transformative effect. At optical frequencies, the gates are potentially much faster and the photons can propagate over long distances and be easily detected, ideal features for quantum networks. Following pioneering work on single atoms, solid-state implementations are important for developing practicable quantum technology. Here, we embed a semiconductor quantum dot in a microcavity. The microcavity has a $mathcal{Q}$-factor close to $10^{6}$ and contains a charge-tunable quantum dot with close-to-transform-limited optical linewidth. The exciton-photon coupling rate $g$ exceeds both the photon decay rate $kappa$ and exciton decay rate $gamma$ by a large margin ($g/gamma=14$, $g/kappa=5.3$); the cooperativity is $C=2g^{2}/(gamma kappa)=150$, the $beta$-factor 99.7%. We observe pronounced vacuum Rabi oscillations in the time-domain, photon blockade at a one-photon resonance, and highly bunched photon statistics at a two-photon resonance. We use the change in photon statistics as a sensitive spectral probe of transitions between the first and second rungs of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder. All experiments can be described quantitatively with the Jaynes-Cummings model despite the complexity of the solid-state environment. We propose this system as a platform to develop optical-cQED for quantum technology, for instance a photon-photon entangling gate.
We present a semiconductor master equation technique to study the input/output characteristics of coherent photon transport in a semiconductor waveguide-cavity system containing a single quantum dot. We use this approach to investigate the effects of photon propagation and anharmonic cavity-QED for various dot-cavity interaction strengths, including weakly-coupled, intermediately-coupled, and strongly-coupled regimes. We demonstrate that for mean photon numbers much less than 0.1, the commonly adopted weak excitation (single quantum) approximation breaks down, even in the weak coupling regime. As a measure of the anharmonic multiphoton-correlations, we compute the Fano factor and the correlation error associated with making a semiclassical approximation. We also explore the role of electron--acoustic-phonon scattering and find that phonon-mediated scattering plays a qualitatively important role on the light propagation characteristics. As an application of the theory, we simulate a conditional phase gate at a phonon bath temperature of $20 $K in the strong coupling regime.