Phys.org September 22, 2020
If the quantum emitter is excited with laser light and fluoresces, it will always emit exactly one photon with each quantum leap. For this type of source, it is then still a challenge to efficiently “feed” the emitted photons into a glass fiber to send as many of them as possible to the receiver. An international team of researchers (Austria, Germany, Denmark) generated strongly correlated photon states using only weak coupling and taking advantage of dissipation. An ensemble of non-interacting waveguide-coupled atoms induces correlations between simultaneously arriving photons through collectively enhanced nonlinear interactions. These correlated photons experience less dissipation than the uncorrelated ones. Depending on the number of atoms, they observed strong photon bunching or antibunching of the transmitted light. Collectively enhanced nonlinearity may be transformational for quantum information science and opens new avenues for generating non-classical light, covering frequencies from the microwave to the X-ray regime…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Credit: CC0 Public Domain