Interference of Spontaneous Emission of Light from two Solid-State Atomic Ensembles
Quantum Physics
2009-11-13 v2
Abstract
We report an interference experiment of spontaneous emission of light from two distant solid-state ensembles of atoms that are coherently excited by a short laser pulse. The ensembles are Erbium ions doped into two LiNbO3 crystals with channel waveguides, which are placed in the two arms of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The light that is spontaneously emitted after the excitation pulse shows first-order interference. By a strong collective enhancement of the emission, the atoms behave as ideal two-level quantum systems and no which-path information is left in the atomic ensembles after emission of a photon. This results in a high fringe visibility of 95%, which implies that the observed spontaneous emission is highly coherent.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0709.1335,
title = {Interference of Spontaneous Emission of Light from two Solid-State Atomic Ensembles},
author = {M. Afzelius and M. U. Staudt and H. de. Riedmatten and C. Simon and S. R. Hastings-Simon and R. Ricken and H. Suche and W. Sohler and N. Gisin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0709.1335},
year = {2009}
}