Heidelberg 2015 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 31: Poster: Quantum Optics and Photonics II

Q 31.15: Poster

Dienstag, 24. März 2015, 17:00–19:00, C/Foyer

Single-Mode Photon Blockade in Single-Atom Cavity QED — •Christoph Hamsen, Haytham Chibani, Tatjana Wilk, and Gerhard Rempe — Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1, D-85748 Garching

Large light-matter couplings are a prerequisite for quantum information and can be used to mediate interactions of otherwise non-interacting photons. A paradigm is the strongly-coupled atom-cavity system where the coupling rate between a single atom and a single mode of light exceeds all decay rates. Such a system exhibits large optical nonlinearities resulting from the anharmonic dressed-state ladder of the Jaynes-Cummings model, a direct consequence of its quantum nature. This anharmonicity can either be resolved spectrally by probing the higher excitation states or via photon statistics of the emitted light. In the latter case, driving the system resonant to an eigenstate of the first manifold, excitation by a first photon blocks the transmission of a second. This so-called photon blockade was previously observed for a multi-state atom coupling to two polarization modes, where the mode excited via the external driving field was blocked by a polarizer and only photons channeled into the other mode were evaluated [1]. Here, we investigate the pristine Jaynes-Cummings system consisting of a two-level atom strongly coupled to a single mode of light. We demonstrate that a Poissonian driving field is converted into a sub-Poissonian stream of photons. The time-dependent two-photon correlation function grants insight into the system's internal dynamics. [1] K. M. Birnbaum et al., Nature 436, 87-90 (2005)