Freiburg 2019 – scientific programme

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FM: Fall Meeting

FM 53: Enabling Technologies: Sources of Quantum States of Light III

FM 53.6: Talk

Wednesday, September 25, 2019, 15:30–15:45, 1010

Photon-pair generation mediated by coupling of emitters to nonlinear photonic nanostructures — •Sina Saravi^1,4, Alexander Poddubny^2,3, Thomas Pertsch¹, Frank Setzpfandt¹, and Andrey A. Sukhorukov⁴ — ¹Institute of Applied Physics, Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany — ²ITMO University, St. Petersburg, Russia — ³Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia — ⁴Nonlinear Physics Centre, Research School of Physics and Engineering, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

We theoretically investigate a hybrid system of an atom-like emitter coupled to a nanostructured nonlinear photonic system. In our proposed configuration, the response of the nonlinear optical system is suppressed to achieve a regime where the response of the hybrid system is dominating. Using a rigorous Green's function quantization method to model the system, we show that in photonic nanostructures with spectral gaps with zero optical density-of-states, nonlinear effects like spontaneous photon-pair generation are prohibited if the frequency of one of the generated photons is in the gap. Moreover, we show that a coupled emitter with a transition frequency in the photonic gap mediates the otherwise forbidden generation of photon pairs, where one photon directly excites the emitter and the other occupies an optical mode. This effect can serve as a sensitive indicator for the presence and excitation of single atoms. Furthermore, this scheme could be used to directly interface quantum memories with photon-pair sources or to realize a deterministic and tunable single-photon source.