Freiburg 2019 – scientific programme
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FM: Fall Meeting
FM 32: Enabling Technologies: Sources of Quantum States of Light II
FM 32.7: Talk
Tuesday, September 24, 2019, 15:45–16:00, 1010
Spectral Compression of Narrowband Single Photons — Mathias A. Seidler1, •Xi Jie Yeo1, Alessandro Cerè1, and Christian Kurtsiefer1,2 — 1Centre for Quantum Technologies, Singapore — 2National University of Singapore, Singapore
We present a successful experimental demonstration of a spectral compression of heralded single photons with narrow spectral bandwidth around 795 nm. The original photons are generated through four-wave mixing in a cloud of cold Rubidium-87 atoms and have a bandwidth about 3 times larger than the corresponding atomic transition. Our spectral compression method was inspired by techniques to compress ultra-fast pulses. We chose an asymmetric cavity as the dispersion medium. The design of the cavity also ensures that spectral compression can be performed, in principle, without any optical losses. Experimentally. we were able to compress the spectral bandwidth of the photons by a factor of 2.6, from 20.6 MHz to less than 8 MHz, almost matching the corresponding atomic transition linewidth of 6 MHz. The better matching of photon bandwidths allow for more efficient of photon-atom interaction, which is crucial in many applications involving quantum interfaces.