Observation of ground-state quantum beats in atomic spontaneous emission

Abstract

We report ground-state quantum beats in spontaneous emission from a continuously driven atomic ensemble. Beats are visible only in an intensity autocorrelation and evidence spontaneously generated coherence in radiative decay. Our measurement realizes a quantum eraser where a first photon detection prepares a superposition and a second erases the "which-path" information in the intermediate state.

4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Letters

References in corpus (5)

• Stimulated and spontaneous optical generation of electron spin coherence in charged GaAs quantum dots
• Photon-Photon Entanglement with a Single Trapped Atom
• Atom detection in a two-mode optical cavity with intermediate coupling: Autocorrelation studies
• From quantum feedback to probabilistic error correction: Manipulation of quantum beats in cavity QED
• Effect of atomic beam alignment on photon correlation measurements in cavity QED

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Vacuum-assisted generation and control of atomic coherences at x-ray energies
• Emergent dark states from superradiant dynamics in multilevel atoms in a cavity
• Quantum interference in a four-level system of a ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atom: Effects of spontaneously generated coherence
• Quantum interference in the absorption and emission of single photons by a single ion
• Control of conditional quantum beats in cavity QED: amplitude decoherence and phase shifts
• Intensity correlations in the forward four-wave mixing driven by a single pump
• Anomalous light shift through quantum jumps in quasi-resonant Rayleigh scattering
• Tunable photon-mediated interactions between spin-1 systems
• Spontaneous creation and persistence of ground-state coherence in a resonantly driven intra-cavity atomic ensemble
• Interference-assisted squeezing in fluorescence radiation
• Time-dependent spectra of quantum beats
• Conditional control of quantum beats in a cavity QED system
• Quantum interference in the resonance fluorescence of a $J=1/2$-$J^{\prime }=1/2$ atomic system: Quantum beats, nonclassicality, and non-Gaussianity
• High flux cold Rubidium atomic beam for strongly coupled Cavity QED
• Quantum beats and metrology in a rapidly rotating Nitrogen-Vacancy center
• Quantum superposition principle and generation of ultrashort optical pulses
• Feedback in a cavity QED system for control of quantum beats