Polarisation oscillations in birefringent emitter-cavity systems
Abstract
We present the effects of resonator birefringence on the cavity-enhanced interfacing of quantum states of light and matter, including the first observation of single photons with a time-dependent polarisation state that evolves within their coherence time. A theoretical model is introduced and experimentally verified by the modified polarisation of temporally-long single photons emitted from a Rb atom coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity by a vacuum-stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (V-STIRAP) process. Further theoretical investigation shows how a change in cavity birefringence can both impact the atom-cavity coupling and engender starkly different polarisation behaviour in the emitted photons. With polarisation a key resource for encoding quantum states of light and modern micron-scale cavities particularly prone to birefringence, the consideration of these effects is vital to the faithful realisation of efficient and coherent emitter-photon interfaces for distributed quantum networking and communications.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1807.07633,
title = {Polarisation oscillations in birefringent emitter-cavity systems},
author = {Thomas D. Barrett and Oliver Barter and Dustin Stuart and Ben Yuen and Axel Kuhn},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.07633},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
9 pages, 5 figures including Supplemental Material