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

Benoît Darquié (1) , Matthew P.A. Jones (1) , Jos Dingjan (1) , Jérôme Beugnon (1) , Silvia Bergamini (1) , Yvan R. P. Sortais (1) , Gaëtan Messin (1) , Antoine Browaeys (1) , Philippe Grangier (1)

1 Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l'Institut d'Optique / Optique quantique

By illuminating an individual rubidium atom stored in a tight optical tweezer with short resonant light pulses, we create 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.

Domaines: Physique Quantique [quant-ph]; Optique [physics.optics]

Benoît Darquié, Matthew P.A. Jones, Jos Dingjan, Jérôme Beugnon, Silvia Bergamini, et al.. Controlled Single-Photon Emission from a Single Trapped Two-Level Atom. Science, 2005, 309, pp.454. ⟨hal-00094645⟩