We report on the realization of an all-optical transistor by mapping gate and source photons into strongly interacting Rydberg excitations with different principal quantum numbers in an ultracold atomic ensemble. We obtain a record switch contrast of 40 % for a coherent gate input with mean photon number one and demonstrate attenuation of source transmission by over 10 photons with a single gate photon. We use our optical transistor to demonstrate the nondestructive detection of a single Rydberg atom with a fidelity of 0.72(4).
@article{arxiv.1404.2876,
title = {Single Photon Transistor Mediated by Inter-State Rydberg Interaction},
author = {Hannes Gorniaczyk and Christoph Tresp and Johannes Schmidt and Helmut Fedder and Sebastian Hofferberth},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.2876},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Submitted to Physical Review Letters on March 27, 2014