Nonlinear optics with less than one photon

Abstract

We demonstrate suppression and enhancement of spontaneous parametric down- conversion via quantum interference with two weak fields from a local oscillator (LO). Pairs of LO photons are observed to upconvert with high efficiency for appropriate phase settings, exhibiting an effective nonlinearity enhanced by at least 10 orders of magnitude. This constitutes a two-photon switch, and promises to be useful for a variety of nonlinear optical effects at the quantum level.

8 pages, 5 figures

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Experimental joint weak measurement on a photon pair as a probe of Hardy's Paradox
• Nonlinear interactions with an ultrahigh flux of broadband entangled photons
• Single Photons on Pseudo-Demand from Stored Parametric Down-Conversion
• Experimental application of decoherence-free subspaces in a quantum-computing algorithm
• Quantum description of light pulse scattering on a single atom in waveguides
• Extracting joint weak values with local, single-particle measurements
• Quantum Indistinguishability by Path Identity: The awakening of a sleeping beauty
• A conditional-phase switch at the single-photon level
• Violation of Bell's Inequality with Photons from Independent Sources
• Quantum correlations in optical metrology: Heisenberg-limited phase estimation without mode entanglement
• Distributed Quantum Metrology with a Single Squeezed-Vacuum Source
• Generation of Entangled Photon Holes using Quantum Interference
• Design of a High Power Continuous Source of Broadband Down-Converted Light
• Micro-resonator based all-optical transistor
• Violation of Bell Inequality with Unentangled Photons
• Entangling independent particles by path identity
• Photon-exchange effects on photon-pair transmission
• Weak-Light Nonlinearity Using a Dark State in Coupled Quantum Dots