Partially Nondestructive Continuous Detection of Individual Traveling Optical Photons

Abstract

We report the continuous and partially nondestructive measurement of optical photons. For a weak light pulse traveling through a slow-light optical medium (signal), the associated atomic-excitation component is detected by another light beam (probe) with the aid of an optical cavity. We observe strong correlations of $g_{sp}^{(2)}=4.4(5)$ between the transmitted signal and probe photons. The observed (intrinsic) conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency ranges between 13% and 1% (65% and 5%) for a signal transmission range of 2% to 35%, at a typical time resolution of 2.5 $\mu$s. The maximal observed (intrinsic) device nondestructive quantum efficiency, defined as the product of the conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency and the signal transmission, is 0.5% (2.4%). The normalized cross-correlation function violates the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, confirming the non-classical character of the correlations.

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• Theory of cavity-enhanced non-destructive detection of photonic qubits in a solid-state atomic ensemble
• Requirements for fault-tolerant quantum computation with cavity-QED-based atom-atom gates mediated by a photon with a finite pulse length
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