25 November 2016

Our group report on a heralded single photon source with controllable emission time based on a cold atomic ensemble. In this work, we collaborate with Dr. Nicolas Sangouard from University of Basel. The scientific results of this study have been published in Nature Communications.

The cold atomic ensemble can generate photons with temporal durations varying over three orders of magnitude up to 10 μs without a significant change of the readout efficiency. We prove the nonclassicality of the emitted photons, show that they are emitted in a pure state, and demonstrate that ultra-long photons with nonstandard wave shape can be generated, which are ideally suited for several quantum information tasks.

The research team that participated in this study includes Pau Farrera, Georg Heinze, Dr. Boris Albrecht, Melvyn Ho, Matías Chávez, Dr. Colin Teo,  Prof. Nicolas Sangouard and Prof. Hugues de Riedmatten.

Reference :

Generation of single photons with highly tunable wave shape from a cold atomic ensemble
Pau Farrera, Georg Heinze, Boris Albrecht, Melvyn Ho, Matías Chávez, Colin Teo, Nicolas Sangouard & Hugues de Riedmatten
Nature Communications 7, 13556 (2016) (see also arXiv:1601.07142)