Hamburg 2009 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 35: Quanteneffekte: QED / Interferenz und Korrelationen I

Q 35.5: Talk

Wednesday, March 4, 2009, 15:00–15:15, VMP 6 HS-E

Two-photon gateway in one-atom cavity quantum electrodynamics — •Alexander Kubanek, Alexei Ourjoumtsev, Ingrid Schuster, Markus Koch, Pepijn Pinkse, Karim Murr, and Gerhard Rempe — Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1, 85748 Garching

Single atoms absorb and emit light from a resonant laser beam photon by photon. However, an atom strongly coupled to light inside a high-finesse optical cavity forms a new system with an anharmonic energy structure. This anharmonicity allows the selective excitation of a two-photon resonance [1], where the system absorbs and emits pairs of photons. In a photon correlation experiment [2] we demonstrate how the system transforms an incoming random stream of laser photons into a correlated beam of output photons, thereby acting as a two-photon gateway. The Poissonian distributed light changes into super-Poissonian, bunched light. This effect opens up the possibility to control the interaction of two photons by means of one atom.

[1] I.Schuster et al., Nature Phys. 4, 382 (2008)

[2] A.Kubanek et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 203602 (2008)