On-demand indistinguishable single photons from an efficient and pure source based on a Rydberg ensemble
Abstract
Single photons coupled to atomic systems have shown to be a promising platform for developing quantum technologies. Yet a bright on-demand, highly pure, and highly indistinguishable single-photon source compatible with atomic platforms is lacking. In this work, we demonstrate such a source based on a strongly interacting Rydberg system. The large optical nonlinearities in a blockaded Rydberg ensemble convert coherent light into a single collective excitation that can be coherently retrieved as a quantum field. We simultaneously observe a fully single-mode (spectral, temporal, spatial, and polarization) efficiency up to 0.098(2), a detector-background-subtracted g ( 2 ) = 5.0 ( 1.6 ) × 10 − 4 , and indistinguishability of 0.980(7), at an average photon production rate of 1.18 ( 2 ) × 10 4 s − 1 . All of these make this system promising for scalable quantum information applications. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of contaminant Rydberg excitations on the source efficiency and observed single-mode efficiencies up to 0.18(2) for lower photon rates. Finally, recognizing that many quantum information protocols require a single photon in a fully single mode, we introduce metrics that take into account all degrees of freedom to benchmark the performance of on-demand sources.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jul 15, 2020
- Source ID
- 10.1364/optica.391485
Entities
People
- A. J. Hachtel
- A. V. Gorshkov
- Alexander Craddock
- Dalia Ornelas-Huerta
- E. A. Goldschmidt
- J. V. Porto
- Przemysław Bienias
- S L Rolston
- Yaonan Wang
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Army Research Office
- National Science Foundation
- Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research
- United States Army Research Laboratory