No Arabic abstract
Developments in quantum technologies lead to new applications that require radiation sources with specific photon statistics. A widely used Poissonian statistics are easily produced by lasers; however, some applications require super- or sub-Poissonian statistics. Statistical properties of a light source are characterized by the second-order coherence function g^(2)(0). This function distinguishes stimulated radiation of lasers with g^(2)(0)=1 from light of other sources. For example, g^(2)(0)=2 for black-body radiation, and g^(2)(0)=0 for single-photon emission. One of the applications requiring super-Poissonian statistics (g^(2)(0)>1) is ghost imaging with thermal light. Ghost imaging also requires light with a narrow linewidth and high intensity. Currently, rather expensive and inefficient light sources are used for this purpose. In the last year, a superluminescent diode based on amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) has been considered as a new light source for ghost imaging. Even though ASE has been widely studied, its photon statistics has not been settled - there are neither reliable theoretical estimates of the second-order coherence function nor unambiguous experimental data. Our computer simulation clearly establishes that coherence properties of light produced by ASE are similar to that of a thermal source with g^(2)(0)=2 independent of pump power. This result manifests the fundamental difference between ASE and laser radiation.
Population inversion on the 5D-6P transition in Rb atoms produced by cw excitation at different wavelengths has been analysed by comparing the generated mid-IR radiation at 5.23 um originated from amplified spontaneous emission and isotropic blue fluorescence at 420 nm. A novel method of detecting two-photon excitation in atomic vapours using ASE is suggested. We have observed directional co- and counter-propagating emission at 5.23 um. We find that the power dependencies of the backward- and forward-directed emission can be very close, however their spectral dependencies are not identical. The mid-IR emission in Rb vapours excited by nearly counter-propagating beams at 780 and 776 nm does not exactly coincide spatially with the applied laser beams. The presented observations could be useful for enhancing efficiency of frequency mixing processes and new field generation in atomic media.
The ability to harness light-matter interactions at the few-photon level plays a pivotal role in quantum technologies. Single photons - the most elementary states of light - can be generated on-demand in atomic and solid state emitters. Two-photon states are also key quantum assets, but achieving them in individual emitters is challenging because their generation rate is much slower than competing one-photon processes. We demonstrate that atomically thin plasmonic nanostructures can harness two-photon spontaneous emission, resulting in giant far-field two-photon production, a wealth of resonant modes enabling tailored photonic and plasmonic entangled states, and plasmon-assisted single-photon creation orders of magnitude more efficient than standard one-photon emission. We unravel the two-photon spontaneous emission channels and show that their spectral line-shapes emerge from an intricate interplay between Fano and Lorentzian resonances. Enhanced two-photon spontaneous emission in two-dimensional nanostructures paves the way to an alternative efficient source of light-matter entanglement for on-chip quantum information processing and free-space quantum communications.
We present a fully quantum mechanical treatment of optically rephased photon echoes. These echoes exhibit noise due to amplified spontaneous emission, however this noise can be seen as a consequence of the entanglement between the atoms and the output light. With a rephasing pulse one can get an echo of the amplified spontaneous emission, leading to light with nonclassical correlations at points separated in time, which is of interest in the context of building wide bandwidth quantum repeaters. We also suggest a wideband version of DLCZ protocol based on the same ideas.
We create an optical frequency, polarization independent, narrow band-pass filter of 1.3 GHz (3 dB bandwidth), using the steep dispersion near the Rubidium D1 atomic transitions within a prism-shaped vapor cell. This enables us to clean the amplified spontaneous emission from a laser by more than 3 orders of magnitude. Such a filter could find uses in fields such as quantum information processing and Raman spectroscopy.
We measured the ensemble-averaged spectral correlation functions and statistical distributions of spectral spacing and intensity for lasing modes in weakly scattering systems, and compared them to those of the amplified spontaneous emission spikes. Their dramatic differences illustrated the distinct physical mechanisms. Our numerical simulation revealed that even without reabsorption the number of potential lasing modes might be greatly reduced by local excitation of a weakly scattering system. The lasing modes could be drastically different from the quasimodes of the passive system due to selective amplification of the feedback from the scatterers within the local gain region.