Strongly interacting photons in hollow-core waveguides

Abstract

Hollow-core photonic-crystal waveguides filled with cold atoms can support giant optical nonlinearities through nondispersive propagation of light tightly confined in the transverse direction. Here we explore electromagnetically induced transparency is such structures, considering a pair of counter-propagating weak quantum fields in the medium of coherently driven atoms in the ladder configuration. Strong dipole--dipole interactions between optically excited, polarized Rydberg states of the atoms translate into a large dispersive interaction between the two fields. This can be used to attain a spatially-homogeneous conditional phase shift of pi for two single-photon pulses, realizing a deterministic photonic phase gate, or to implement a quantum nondemolition measurement of the photon number in the signal pulse by a coherent probe, thereby achieving a heralded source of single or few photon pulses.

References in corpus (6)

• Cooperative atom-light interaction in a blockaded Rydberg ensemble
• Long-range interactions and entanglement of slow single-photon pulses
• Low-Light-Level Optical Interactions with Rubidium Vapor in a Photonic Bandgap Fiber
• Magneto-optical rotation and cross-phase modulation via coherently driven tripod atoms
• Large Cross-Phase Modulation between Slow Co-propagating Weak Pulses in Rb
• Towards deterministic optical quantum computation with coherently driven atomic ensembles

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Quantum fluids of light
• Dissipative Many-body Quantum Optics in Rydberg Media
• Photon-photon gate via the interaction between two collective Rydberg excitations
• Stimulated adiabatic passage in a dissipative Rydberg superatom
• Electromagnetically induced transparency of ultralong-range Rydberg molecules
• Interacting photon pulses in Rydberg medium
• Electromagnetically induced transparency with controlled van der Waals interaction
• Dipolar exchange induced transparency with Rydberg atoms
• Chirped Multi-photon adiabatic passage for a four-level ladder-type Rydberg excitation
• Manipulating photonic quantum states with long-range interactions