Efficient retrieval of a single excitation stored in an atomic ensemble

Abstract

We report significant improvements in the retrieval efficiency of a single excitation stored in an atomic ensemble and in the subsequent generation of strongly correlated pairs of photons. A 50% probability to transform the stored excitation into one photon in a well-defined spatio-temporal mode at the output of the ensemble is demonstrated. These improvements are illustrated by the generation of high-quality heralded single photons with a suppression of the two-photon component below 1% of the value for a coherent state. A broad characterization of our system is performed for different parameters in order to provide input for the future design of realistic quantum networks.

References in corpus (2)

• High quality asynchronous heralded single photon source at telecom wavelength
• Characterization of the non-classical nature of conditionally prepared single photons

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• Direct measurement of decoherence for entanglement between a photon and stored atomic excitation
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• Towards experimental entanglement connection with atomic ensembles in the single excitation regime
• Dynamics of saturated Bragg diffraction in a stored light grating in cold atoms