Atom-Resonant Heralded Single Photons by Interaction-Free Measurement

Abstract

We demonstrate the generation of rubidium-resonant heralded single photons for quantum memories. Photon pairs are created by cavity-enhanced down-conversion and narrowed in bandwidth to 7 MHz with a novel atom-based filter operating by "interaction-free measurement" principles. At least 94% of the heralded photons are atom-resonant as demonstrated by a direct absorption measurement with rubidium vapor. A heralded auto-correlation measurement shows $g_c^{(2)}(0)=0.040\pm 0.012$, i.e., suppression of multi-photon contributions by a factor of 25 relative to a coherent state. The generated heralded photons can readily be used in quantum memories and quantum networks.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Generation of a superposition of odd photon number states for quantum information networks
• Strong interaction between light and a single trapped atom without a cavity
• High quality asynchronous heralded single photon source at telecom wavelength
• High purity bright single photon source
• Time-bin modulated polarization-entangled biphotons from cavity-enhanced down-conversion
• Coherence measures for heralded single-photon sources
• Bright filter-free source of indistinguishable photon pairs
• Interaction-free measurements with superconducting qubits
• Theory of biphoton generation in a single-resonant optical parametric oscillator far below threshold