Cavity-mediated electron-photon pairs
Abstract
Advancing quantum information, communication and sensing relies on the generation and control of quantum correlations in complementary degrees of freedom. Here, we demonstrate the preparation of electron-photon pair states using the phase-matched interaction of free electrons with the evanescent vacuum field of a photonic-chip-based optical microresonator. Spontaneous inelastic scattering produces intracavity photons coincident with energy-shifted electrons. Harnessing these pairs for correlation-enhanced imaging, we achieve a two-orders of magnitude contrast improvement in cavity-mode mapping by coincidence-gated electron spectroscopy. This parametric pair-state preparation will underpin the future development of free-electron quantum optics, providing a pathway to quantum-enhanced imaging, electron-photon entanglement, and heralded single-electron and Fock-state photon sources.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2202.12821,
title = {Cavity-mediated electron-photon pairs},
author = {A. Feist and G. Huang and G. Arend and Y. Yang and J. -W. Henke and A. S. Raja and F. J. Kappert and R. N. Wang and H. Lourenço-Martins and Z. Qiu and J. Liu and O. Kfir and T. J. Kippenberg and C. Ropers},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.12821},
year = {2022}
}