Single photons with tailored temporal profiles are a vital resource for future quantum networks. Here we distill them out of custom-shaped laser pulses that reflect from a single atom strongly coupled to an optical resonator. A subsequent measurement on the atom is employed to herald a successful distillation. Out of vacuum-dominated light pulses, we create single photons with fidelity 66(1)%, two-and-more-photon suppression 95.5(6)%, and a Wigner function with negative value −0.125(6). Our scheme applied to state-of-the-art fiber resonators could boost the single-photon fidelity to up to 96%.
@article{arxiv.1904.04693,
title = {Single-Photon Distillation via a Photonic Parity Measurement Using Cavity QED},
author = {Severin Daiss and Stephan Welte and Bastian Hacker and Lin Li and Gerhard Rempe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.04693},
year = {2019}
}