Interfacing Collective Atomic Excitations and Single Photons

Abstract

We study the performance and limitations of a coherent interface between collective atomic states and single photons. A quantized spin-wave excitation of an atomic sample inside an optical resonator is prepared probabilistically, stored, and adiabatically converted on demand into a sub-Poissonian photonic excitation of the resonator mode. The measured peak single-quantum conversion efficiency of 0.84(11) and its dependence on various parameters are well described by a simple model of the mode geometry and multilevel atomic structure, pointing the way towards implementing high-performance stationary single-photon sources.

4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to PRL

References in corpus (3)

• Deterministic single photons via conditional quantum evolution
• Conditional control of the quantum states of remote atomic memories for quantum networking
• Efficient retrieval of a single excitation stored in an atomic ensemble

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