Demonstration of Deterministic Photon-Photon Interactions by Interference-Based Single Photon Nonlinearity (Prof. B. Dayan)

  • Date: Nov 18, 2014
  • Time: 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Professor Dr. Barak Dayan, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
  • Room: Herbert Walther Lecture Hall
  • Host: MPQ
Achieving optical nonlinear interactions at the level of single photons has been the subject of extensive research in the last couple of decades.

I will present the recent demonstration of deterministic, all-optical photon-photon interactions based on a single atom. This scheme swaps the quantum states of a single photon and a single quantum emitter (a 87Rb atom, in our case). Based on passive, interference-based nonlinearity, this scheme requires no control fields, and can function as a quantum memory and even a universal quantum gate. It can therefore provide a building block for scalable quantum networks based on completely passive photonic devices interconnected and activated solely by single photons.

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