Frankfurt 2006 – scientific programme

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Q: Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 71: Poster Nichtlineare optische Effekte und Lichtquellen

Q 71.6: Poster

Thursday, March 16, 2006, 16:30–18:30, Labsaal

Optical Parametric Oscillator as a Narrow-Band Single-Photon Source — •Florian Wolfgramm, Matthias Scholz, and Oliver Benson — Humboldt-University of Berlin, Physics Department, AG Nano-Optics, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, D-10117 Berlin, Germany

Recently, there has been extensive progress on the storage of single photons. Most storage schemes rely on the matching of photons to atomic resonances and therefore require single photons of narrow bandwidth. This feature is not fulfilled by most of today’s single photon sources based on quantum dots, molecules, or NV-centers in diamond.
While narrow bandwidths have been achieved using single stored atoms or ions, our approach generates single photons non-deterministically by parametric down-conversion inside a cavity, following the ideas of (1). At low pump power, the photon bandwidth is solely determined by the cavity and can easily reach values down to a few 10 MHz.
We plan to use parametric down-conversion in a BiBO crystal pumped by a frequency doubled diode laser to generate photons at the D1-transition of cesium. BiBO allows type-II down-conversion in this frequency range, and signal and idler photon can be separated by polarization. Such a narrow-band photon source will have wide applications in the field of quantum information processing.

(1) Lu and Ou, Phys. Rev. A 62, 033804 (2000)