Hannover 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 71: Quantum Effects: QED IV

Q 71.6: Vortrag

Freitag, 4. März 2016, 16:00–16:15, f442

Paraxial Theory of Direct Electro-Optic Sampling of the Quantum Vacuum — •Andrey S. Moskalenko, Claudius Riek, Denis V. Seletskiy, Guido Burkard, and Alfred Leitenstorfer — Department of Physics and Center for Applied Photonics, University of Konstanz, Germany

The quantum vacuum is one of the most fundamental states of light and matter fields. Quantum mechanics teaches us that the vacuum is not just empty space: E.g., in the vacuum state, even in the absence of any photons, the electromagnetic field is not strictly zero but fluctuates. A fundamental question is whether and how one can access these fluctuations directly. Despite many indirect measurements, this question has remained open until very recently [1].

We theoretically show that vacuum fluctuations of the electric field in free space can be directly detected using the linear electro-optic effect [2]. We demonstrate that the fluctuations in the ground state lead to an increase of the measured signal variance on top of the shot noise and can be directly resolved, as experimentally confirmed [1]. Furthermore, applying the theory to a squeezed vacuum state, we predict that temporal oscillations of the electric field noise, significantly beating the pure vacuum level, can be traced with sub-cycle resolution [2]. We believe that our findings pave the way for an approach to quantum optics operating in an extreme time-domain limit, providing access to quantum statistics of light on a sub-cycle time scale.

[1] C. Riek et al., Science 350, 420 (2015).

[2] A.S. Moskalenko et al., arXiv:1508.06953, accepted in PRL.