Single photons coupled to atomic systems have shown to be a promising platform for developing quantum technologies. Yet a bright on-demand, highly pure and highly indistinguishable single-photon source compatible with atomic platforms is lacking. In this work, we demonstrate such a source based on a strongly interacting Rydberg system. The large optical nonlinearities in a blockaded Rydberg ensemble convert coherent light into a single-collective excitation that can be coherently retrieved as a quantum field. We observe a single-transverse-mode efficiency up to 0.18(2), g(2)=2.0(1.5)×10−4, and indistinguishability of 0.982(7), making this system promising for scalable quantum information applications. Accounting for losses, we infer a generation probability up to 0.40(4). Furthermore, we investigate the effects of contaminant Rydberg excitations on the source efficiency. Finally, we introduce metrics to benchmark the performance of on-demand single-photon sources.
@article{arxiv.2003.02202,
title = {On-demand indistinguishable single photons from an efficient and pure source based on a Rydberg ensemble},
author = {Dalia P. Ornelas-Huerta and Alexander N. Craddock and Elizabeth A. Goldschmidt and Andrew J. Hachtel and Yidan Wang and P. Bienias and Alexey V. Gorshkov and Steve L. Rolston and James V. Porto},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.02202},
year = {2020}
}