Emission of Microwave Photon Pairs by a Tunnel Junction

Abstract

Generation and control of non-classical electromagnetic fields is of crucial importance for quantum information physics. While usual methods for the production of such fields rely on a non-linearity (of a crystal, a Josephson junction, etc.), a recent experiment performed on a normal conductor, a tunnel junction under microwave irradiation, has unveiled an alternative: the use of electron shot noise in a quantum conductor\cite{PAN_squeezing}. Here we show that such a device can emit \emph{pairs of microwave photons} of different frequencies with a rate as high as that of superconducting Josephson junctions\cite{Flurin}. This results in intensity fluctuations of the photon field at two different frequencies being correlated below the photon shot noise,i.e. two-mode amplitude squeezing. Our experiment constitutes a fundamental step towards the understanding of electronic noise in terms of quantum optics, and shows that even a normal conductor could be used as a resource for quantum information processing.

6 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Generating Entangled Microwave Radiation Over Two Transmission Lines
• Dynamics of Quantum Noise in a Tunnel Junction under ac Excitation
• Temperature dependent third cumulant of tunneling noise
• Feedback of the electromagnetic environment on current and voltage fluctuations out of equilibrium

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Theory of light emission from quantum noise in plasmonic contacts: above-threshold emission from higher-order electron-plasmon scattering
• Photon Statistics of Propagating Thermal Microwaves
• Josephson photonics with a two-mode superconducting circuit
• Generating two continuous entangled microwave beams using a dc-biased Josephson junction
• Experimental Violation Of Bell-like Inequalities By Electronic Shot Noise
• Processing quantum signals carried by electrical currents
• Charge-photon transport statistics and short-time correlations in a single quantum dot-resonator system with arbitrarily large coupling parameter
• Photon-pair blockade in a Josephson-photonics circuit with two nondegenerate microwave resonators
• Non-Classical Radiation Emission By A Coherent Conductor
• Counting statistics of ultra-broadband microwave photons
• Non-classical current noise and light emission of an ac-driven tunnel junction