Controlled Single-Photon Emission from a Single Trapped Two-Level Atom

By illuminating an individual rubidium atom stored in a tight optical tweezer with short resonant light pulses, we created an efficient triggered source of single photons with a well-defined polarization. The measured intensity correlation of the emitted light pulses exhibits almost perfect antibunching. Such a source of high-rate, fully controlled single-photon pulses has many potential applications for quantum information processing.

[1]  C. Monroe,et al.  Observation of entanglement between a single trapped atom and a single photon , 2004, Nature.

[2]  H. Kimble,et al.  Efficient engineering of multiatom entanglement through single-photon detections. , 2003, Physical review letters.

[3]  E. Knill,et al.  A scheme for efficient quantum computation with linear optics , 2001, Nature.

[4]  C. Simon,et al.  Robust long-distance entanglement and a loophole-free bell test with ions and photons. , 2003, Physical review letters.

[5]  T. Hänsch,et al.  Controlled collisions for multi-particle entanglement of optically trapped atoms , 2003, Nature.

[6]  Herbert Walther,et al.  Continuous generation of single photons with controlled waveform in an ion-trap cavity system , 2004, Nature.

[7]  P Grangier,et al.  Collisional blockade in microscopic optical dipole traps. , 2002, Physical review letters.

[8]  Conditional quantum logic using two atomic qubits , 2002, quant-ph/0206007.

[9]  Igor Protsenko,et al.  Sub-poissonian loading of single atoms in a microscopic dipole trap , 2001, Nature.

[10]  Axel Kuhn,et al.  Kuhn, Hennrich, and Rempe Reply to Comment on "Deterministic single-photon source for distributed quantum networking" , 2002 .

[11]  F. Schmidt-Kaler,et al.  Deterministic quantum teleportation with atoms , 2004, Nature.

[12]  A. D. Boozer,et al.  Deterministic Generation of Single Photons from One Atom Trapped in a Cavity , 2004, Science.

[13]  E. Knill,et al.  Deterministic quantum teleportation of atomic qubits , 2004, Nature.

[14]  J. Roch,et al.  Photon statistics characterization of a single-photon source , 2003, quant-ph/0312084.

[15]  Barry C. Sanders,et al.  Single photons on demand , 2005 .

[16]  Antoine Browaeys,et al.  Holographic generation of microtrap arrays for single atoms by use of a programmable phase modulator , 2004 .

[17]  Gerard J. Milburn,et al.  Towards Scalable Linear-Optical Quantum Computers , 2004, Quantum Inf. Process..

[18]  G. G. Stokes.  "J." , 1890, The New Yale Book of Quotations.

[19]  E. Knill,et al.  Realization of quantum error correction , 2004, Nature.