A single-photon source (also known as a single photon emitter) [1] is a light source that emits light as single particles or photons. Single-photon sources are distinct from coherent light sources (lasers) and thermal light sources such as incandescent light bulbs. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle dictates that a state with an exact number of photons of a single frequency cannot be created. However, Fock states (or number states) can be studied for a system where the electric field amplitude is distributed over a narrow bandwidth. In this context, a single-photon source gives rise to an effectively one-photon number state.
Photons from an ideal single-photon source exhibit quantum mechanical characteristics. These characteristics include photon antibunching, so that the time between two successive photons is never less than some minimum value. This behaviour is normally demonstrated by using a beam splitter to direct about half of the incident photons toward one avalanche photodiode, and half toward a second. Pulses from one detector are used to provide a ‘counter start’ signal, to a fast electronic timer, and the other, delayed by a known number of nanoseconds, is used to provide a ‘counter stop’ signal. By repeatedly measuring the times between ‘start’ and ‘stop’ signals, one can form a histogram of time delay between two photons and the coincidence count- if bunching is not occurring, and photons are indeed well spaced, a clear notch around zero delay is visible.
Although the concept of a single photon was proposed by Planck as early as 1900, [2] a true single-photon source was not created in isolation until 1974. This was achieved by utilising a cascade transition within mercury atoms. [3] Individual atoms emit two photons at different frequencies in the cascade transition and by spectrally filtering the light the observation of one photon can be used to 'herald' the other. The observation of these single photons was characterised by its anticorrelation on the two output ports of a beamsplitter in a similar manner to the famous Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment of 1956. [4]
Another single-photon source came in 1977 which used the fluorescence from an attenuated beam of sodium atoms. [5] A beam of sodium atoms was attenuated so that no more than one or two atoms contributed to the observed fluorescence radiation at any one time. In this way, only single emitters were producing light and the observed fluorescence showed the characteristic antibunching. The isolation of individual atoms continued with ion traps in the mid-1980s. A single ion could be held in a radio frequency Paul trap for an extended period of time (10 min) thus acting as a single emitter of multiple single photons as in the experiments of Diedrich and Walther. [6] At the same time the nonlinear process of parametric down conversion began to be utilised and from then until the present day it has become the workhorse of experiments requiring single photons.
Advances in microscopy led to the isolation of single molecules in the end of the 1980s. [7] Subsequently, single pentacene molecules were detected in p-terphenyl crystals. [8] The single molecules have begun to be utilised as single-photon sources. [9]
Within the 21st century defect centres in various solid state materials have emerged, [10] most notably diamond, silicon carbide [11] [12] and boron nitride. [13] the most studied defect is the nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond that was utilised as a source of single photons. [14] These sources along with molecules can use the strong confinement of light (mirrors, microresonators, optical fibres, waveguides, etc.) to enhance the emission of the NV centres. As well as NV centres and molecules, quantum dots (QDs), [15] quantum dots trapped in optical antenna, [16] functionalized carbon nanotubes, [17] [18] and two-dimensional materials [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] can also emit single photons and can be constructed from the same semiconductor materials as the light-confining structures. It is noted that the single photon sources at telecom wavelength of 1,550 nm are very important in fiber-optic communication and they are mostly indium arsenide QDs. [26] [27] However, by creating downconversion quantum interface from visible single photon sources, one still can create single photon at 1,550 nm with preserved antibunching. [28]
Exciting atoms and excitons to highly interacting Rydberg levels prevents more than one excitation over the so-called blockade volume. Hence Rydberg excitation in a small atomic ensembles [29] [30] or crystals [31] could act as a single photon emitters.
In quantum theory, photons describe quantized electromagnetic radiation. Specifically, a photon is an elementary excitation of a normal mode of the electromagnetic field. Thus a single-photon state is the quantum state of a radiation mode that contains a single excitation.
Single radiation modes are labelled by, among other quantities, the frequency of the electromagnetic radiation that they describe. However, in quantum optics, single-photon states also refer to mathematical superpositions of single-frequency (monochromatic) radiation modes. [32] This definition is general enough to include photon wave-packets, i.e., states of radiation that are localized to some extent in space and time.
Single-photon sources generate single-photon states as described above. In other words, ideal single-photon sources generate radiation with a photon-number distribution that has a mean one and variance zero. [33]
An ideal-single photon source produces single-photon states with 100% probability and optical vacuum or multi-photon states with 0% probability. Desirable properties of real-world single-photon sources include efficiency, robustness, ease of implementation and on-demand nature, i.e., generating single-photons at arbitrarily chosen times. Single-photon sources including single emitters such as single atoms, ions and molecules, and including solid-state emitters such as quantum dots, color centers and carbon nanotubes are on-demand. [34] Currently, there are many active nanomaterials engineered into single quantum emitters where their spontaneous emission could be tuned by changing the local density of optical states in dielectric nanostructures. The dielectric nanostructures are usually designed within the heterostructures to enhance the light-matter interaction, and thus further improve the efficiency of these single photon sources. [35] [36] Another type of source comprises non-deterministic sources, i.e., not on demand, and these include examples such as weak lasers, atomic cascades and parametric down-conversion.
The single-photon nature of a source can be quantized using the second-order correlation function . Ideal single-photon sources show and good single-photon sources have small . The second-order correlation function can be measured using the Hanbury-Brown–Twiss effect.
The generation of a single photon occurs when a source creates only one photon within its fluorescence lifetime after being optically or electrically excited. An ideal single-photon source has yet to be created. Given that the main applications for a high-quality single-photon source are quantum key distribution, quantum repeaters [37] and quantum information science, the photons generated should also have a wavelength that would give low loss and attenuation when travelling through an optical fiber. Nowadays the most common sources of single photons are single molecules, Rydberg atoms, [38] [39] diamond colour centres and quantum dots, with the last being widely studied with efforts from many research groups to realize quantum dots that fluoresce single photons at room temperature with photons in the low loss window of fiber-optic communication. For many purposes single photons need to be anti-bunched, and this can be verified.
One of the first and easiest sources was created by attenuating a conventional laser beam to reduce its intensity and thereby the mean photon number per pulse. [40] Since the photon statistics follow a Poisson distribution one can achieve sources with a well defined probability ratio for the emission of one versus two or more photons. For example, a mean value of μ = 0.1 leads to a probability of 90% for zero photons, 9% for one photon and 1% for more than one photon. [41]
Although such a source can be used for certain applications, it has a second-order intensity correlation function equal to one (no antibunching). For many applications however, antibunching is required, for instance in quantum cryptography.
Pairs of single photons can be generated in highly correlated states from using a single high-energy photon to create two lower-energy ones. One photon from the resulting pair may be detected to 'herald' the other (so its state is pretty well known prior to detection as long as the two photon state is separable, otherwise 'heralding' leaves heralded photon in a mixed state [42] ). The two photons need not generally be the same wavelength, but the total energy and resulting polarisation are defined by the generation process. One area of keen interest for such pairs of photons is quantum key distribution.
The heralded single-photon sources are also used to examine the fundamental physics laws in quantum mechanics. There are two commonly used types of heralded single-photon sources: spontaneous parametric down-conversion and spontaneous four-wave mixing. The first source has line-width around THz and the second one has line-width around MHz or narrower. The heralded single photon has been used to demonstrate photonics storage and loading to the optical cavity.
In atomic physics and chemistry, an atomic electron transition is an electron changing from one energy level to another within an atom or artificial atom. The time scale of a quantum jump has not been measured experimentally. However, the Franck–Condon principle binds the upper limit of this parameter to the order of attoseconds.
Antihydrogen is the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen. Whereas the common hydrogen atom is composed of an electron and proton, the antihydrogen atom is made up of a positron and antiproton. Scientists hope that studying antihydrogen may shed light on the question of why there is more matter than antimatter in the observable universe, known as the baryon asymmetry problem. Antihydrogen is produced artificially in particle accelerators.
Laser cooling includes several techniques where atoms, molecules, and small mechanical systems are cooled with laser light. The directed energy of lasers is often associated with heating materials, e.g. laser cutting, so it can be counterintuitive that laser cooling often results in sample temperatures approaching absolute zero. It is a routine step in many atomic physics experiments where the laser-cooled atoms are then subsequently manipulated and measured, or in technologies, such as atom-based quantum computing architectures. Laser cooling relies on the change in momentum when an object, such as an atom, absorbs and re-emits a photon. For example, if laser light illuminates a warm cloud of atoms from all directions and the laser's frequency is tuned below an atomic resonance, the atoms will be cooled. This common type of laser cooling relies on the Doppler effect where individual atoms will preferentially absorb laser light from the direction opposite to the atom's motion. The absorbed light is re-emitted by the atom in a random direction. After repeated emission and absorption of light the net effect on the cloud of atoms is that they will expand more slowly. The slower expansion reflects a decrease in the velocity distribution of the atoms, which corresponds to a lower temperature and therefore the atoms have been cooled. For an ensemble of particles, their thermodynamic temperature is proportional to the variance in their velocity, therefore the lower the distribution of velocities, the lower temperature of the particles.
This is a timeline of quantum computing.
Spontaneous parametric down-conversion is a nonlinear instant optical process that converts one photon of higher energy into a pair of photons of lower energy, in accordance with the law of conservation of energy and law of conservation of momentum. It is an important process in quantum optics, for the generation of entangled photon pairs, and of single photons.
In physics, the Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) effect is any of a variety of correlation and anti-correlation effects in the intensities received by two detectors from a beam of particles. HBT effects can generally be attributed to the wave–particle duality of the beam, and the results of a given experiment depend on whether the beam is composed of fermions or bosons. Devices which use the effect are commonly called intensity interferometers and were originally used in astronomy, although they are also heavily used in the field of quantum optics.
A Rydberg atom is an excited atom with one or more electrons that have a very high principal quantum number, n. The higher the value of n, the farther the electron is from the nucleus, on average. Rydberg atoms have a number of peculiar properties including an exaggerated response to electric and magnetic fields, long decay periods and electron wavefunctions that approximate, under some conditions, classical orbits of electrons about the nuclei. The core electrons shield the outer electron from the electric field of the nucleus such that, from a distance, the electric potential looks identical to that experienced by the electron in a hydrogen atom.
An atom interferometer uses the wave-like nature of atoms in order to produce interference. In atom interferometers, the roles of matter and light are reversed compared to the laser based interferometers, i.e. the beam splitter and mirrors are lasers while the source emits matter waves rather than light. Atom interferometers measure the difference in phase between atomic matter waves along different paths. Matter waves are controlled an manipulated using systems of lasers. Atom interferometers have been used in tests of fundamental physics, including measurements of the gravitational constant, the fine-structure constant, and universality of free fall. Applied uses of atom interferometers include accelerometers, rotation sensors, and gravity gradiometers.
An optical microcavity or microresonator is a structure formed by reflecting faces on the two sides of a spacer layer or optical medium, or by wrapping a waveguide in a circular fashion to form a ring. The former type is a standing wave cavity, and the latter is a traveling wave cavity. The name microcavity stems from the fact that it is often only a few micrometers thick, the spacer layer sometimes even in the nanometer range. As with common lasers, this forms an optical cavity or optical resonator, allowing a standing wave to form inside the spacer layer or a traveling wave that goes around in the ring.
Doppler cooling is a mechanism that can be used to trap and slow the motion of atoms to cool a substance. The term is sometimes used synonymously with laser cooling, though laser cooling includes other techniques.
The Hong–Ou–Mandel effect is a two-photon interference effect in quantum optics that was demonstrated in 1987 by three physicists from the University of Rochester: Chung Ki Hong (홍정기), Zheyu Ou (区泽宇), and Leonard Mandel. The effect occurs when two identical single-photons enter a 1:1 beam splitter, one in each input port. When the temporal overlap of the photons on the beam splitter is perfect, the two photons will always exit the beam splitter together in the same output mode, meaning that there is zero chance that they will exit separately with one photon in each of the two outputs giving a coincidence event. The photons have a 50:50 chance of exiting (together) in either output mode. If they become more distinguishable, the probability of them each going to a different detector will increase. In this way, the interferometer coincidence signal can accurately measure bandwidth, path lengths, and timing. Since this effect relies on the existence of photons and the second quantization it can not be fully explained by classical optics.
Yoshihisa Yamamoto is the director of Physics & Informatics Laboratories, NTT Research, Inc. He is also Professor (Emeritus) at Stanford University and National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo).
A trion is a bound state of three charged particles. A negatively charged trion in crystals consists of two electrons and one hole, while a positively charged trion consists of two holes and one electron. The binding energy of a trion is largely determined by the exchange interaction between the two electrons (holes). The ground state of a negatively charged trion is a singlet. The triplet state is unbound in the absence of an additional potential or sufficiently strong magnetic field.
An optical transistor, also known as an optical switch or a light valve, is a device that switches or amplifies optical signals. Light occurring on an optical transistor's input changes the intensity of light emitted from the transistor's output while output power is supplied by an additional optical source. Since the input signal intensity may be weaker than that of the source, an optical transistor amplifies the optical signal. The device is the optical analog of the electronic transistor that forms the basis of modern electronic devices. Optical transistors provide a means to control light using only light and has applications in optical computing and fiber-optic communication networks. Such technology has the potential to exceed the speed of electronics, while conserving more power. The fastest demonstrated all-optical switching signal is 900 attoseconds, which paves the way to develop ultrafast optical transistors.
Photonic molecules are a form of matter in which photons bind together to form "molecules". They were first predicted in 2007. Photonic molecules are formed when individual (massless) photons "interact with each other so strongly that they act as though they have mass". In an alternative definition, photons confined to two or more coupled optical cavities also reproduce the physics of interacting atomic energy levels, and have been termed as photonic molecules.
Gerhard Rempe is a German physicist, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Munich. He has performed pioneering experiments in atomic and molecular physics, quantum optics and quantum information processing.
Quantum microscopy allows microscopic properties of matter and quantum particles to be measured and imaged. Various types of microscopy use quantum principles. The first microscope to do so was the scanning tunneling microscope, which paved the way for development of the photoionization microscope and the quantum entanglement microscope.
Jean-Michel Raimond is a French physicist working in the field of quantum mechanics.
A quantum dot single-photon source is based on a single quantum dot placed in an optical cavity. It is an on-demand single-photon source. A laser pulse can excite a pair of carriers known as an exciton in the quantum dot. The decay of a single exciton due to spontaneous emission leads to the emission of a single photon. Due to interactions between excitons, the emission when the quantum dot contains a single exciton is energetically distinct from that when the quantum dot contains more than one exciton. Therefore, a single exciton can be deterministically created by a laser pulse and the quantum dot becomes a nonclassical light source that emits photons one by one and thus shows photon antibunching. The emission of single photons can be proven by measuring the second order intensity correlation function. The spontaneous emission rate of the emitted photons can be enhanced by integrating the quantum dot in an optical cavity. Additionally, the cavity leads to emission in a well-defined optical mode increasing the efficiency of the photon source.
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