We have realized a compact system to efficiently couple the fluorescent light emitted by a single trapped ion to two opposing optical fibers. The fibers are tightly integrated in the center electrodes of a miniature endcap trap. They capture light from the ion with a numerical aperture of 0.34 each, corresponding to 6% of the solid angle in total. The high collection efficiency and high signal-to-background ratio make the setup an ideal quantum light source. We have observed strong antibunching of the photons emitted from the two fibers. The system has a range of applications from single-ion state detection in quantum information processing to strong coupling cavity-QED with ions.
@article{arxiv.1101.5877,
title = {Fiber-coupled single ion as an efficient quantum light source},
author = {Alex Wilson and Hiroki Takahashi and Andrew Riley-Watson and Fedja Orucevic and Peter Blythe and Anders Mortensen and Daniel R. Crick and Nicolas Seymour-Smith and Elisabeth Brama and Matthias Keller and Wolfgang Lange},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.5877},
year = {2015}
}