Non linéarité à un photon

Present members : Philippe Grangier

Former members : Erwan Bimbard, Andrey Grankin, Rajiv Boddeda, Imam Usmani, Alexei Ourjoumtsev, Valentina Parigi, Jovica Stanojevic

This new project is funded by the ERC Advanced Grant 246669 « DELPHI », which stands for « Deterministic Logical Photon-Photon Interactions ». The main objective of the project is to use Rydberg atoms as a highly non-linear optical medium, in order to create deterministic coherent interactions between single photons, or to transform weak laser beams into non-classical states, such as « Schrödinger’s cat » states.

The general idea, sketched on Fig. 1, is first to transform the optical beams into polarization waves (polaritons) propagating inside a cold cloud of Rb atoms [1]. By creating and controlling long-range Rydberg interactions between the atoms, we will make these waves experience the desired non-linear effect, and then turn them back into free-propagating optical beams which we will analyze by photon-counting and homodyne techniques [2] and then turn them back into free-propagating optical beams which we will analyze by photon-counting and homodyne techniques [2 - 8].

rydberg_atoms

Fig.1: Interactions between weak optical beams mediated by Rydberg excitations in a cold gas.

References

[1] M. D. Lukin, M. Fleischhauer and R. Côté, « Dipole Blockade and Quantum Information Processing in Mesoscopic Atomic Ensembles », Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 037901 (2001).

[2] A. Ourjoumtsev, R. Tualle-Brouri, J. Laurat, and P. Grangier,  « Generating Optical Schrödinger Kittens for Quantum Information Processing », Science 312, 83 (2006).

[3] Jovica Stanojevic, Valentina Parigi, Erwan Bimbard, Rosa Tualle-Brouri, Alexei Ourjoumtsev, and Philippe Grangier, "Controlling the quantum state of a single photon emitted from a single polariton", Phys. Rev. A 84, 053830 (2011) [ http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.6195 ]

[4] Jovica Stanojevic, Valentina Parigi, Erwan Bimbard, Alexei Ourjoumtsev, Pierre Pillet, and Philippe Grangier, "Generating non-Gaussian states using collisions between Rydberg polaritons", Phys. Rev. A 86, 021403 (2012) [ http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.6764 ]

[5] Valentina Parigi, Erwan Bimbard, Jovica Stanojevic, Andrew J. Hilliard, Florence Nogrette, Rosa Tualle-Brouri, Alexei Ourjoumtsev, Philippe Grangier, "Observation and Measurement of Interaction-Induced Dispersive Optical Nonlinearities in an Ensemble of Cold Rydberg Atoms", Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 233602 (2012) [ http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.1948 ]

[6] Jovica Stanojevic, Valentina Parigi, Erwan Bimbard, Alexei Ourjoumtsev, and Philippe Grangier, "Dispersive optical nonlinearities in a Rydberg electromagnetically-induced-transparency medium", Phys. Rev. A 88, 053845 (2013), http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.4927

[7] A. Grankin, E. Brion, E. Bimbard, R. Boddeda, I. Usmani, A. Ourjoumtsev and P. Grangier, "Quantum statistics of light transmitted through an intracavity Rydberg medium", New J. Phys. 16 043020 (2014), http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2621

[8] Erwan Bimbard, Rajiv Boddeda, Nicolas Vitrant, Andrey Grankin, Valentina Parigi, Jovica Stanojevic, Alexei Ourjoumtsev, and Philippe Grangier, "Homodyne Tomography of a Single Photon Retrieved on Demand from a Cavity-Enhanced Cold Atom Memory", Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 033601 (2014), http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1228

Non linéarité à un photon