Creating a single phonon in ambient conditions

Nanowerk  October 8, 2019
So far, individual phonons have only been observed at extremely low temperatures and under high vacuum. An international team of researchers (Switzerland, USA – MIT) shot ultrafast laser pulses onto a diamond crystal to excite its atomic lattice into vibrating. By careful design of the experiment, they triggered a collective vibration involving more than 100 billion atoms that exchanged energy with single photons from the laser light. By measuring the energy exchanged by this vibration with single photons, they were able to prove that a single phonon was excited, and confirm that the collective oscillation behaves as a single particle. The research opens exciting perspectives in the study of quantum phenomena in other naturally occurring materials and molecular systems and it could have applications in room-temperature ultrafast quantum technologies…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE