Controlling Light with Light: Demonstration of Deterministic Photon-Photon Interactions


  Barak Dayan  
Weizmann Institute of Science

Achieving optical nonlinear interactions at the level of single photons has been the goal of extensive efforts in the last couple of decades. I will present our recent demonstration of deterministic, all-optical photon-photon interactions based on a single atom. This scheme performs deterministic quantum state-transfer between a photon and a single quantum emitter (a 87Rb atom, in our case). Based on passive, interference-based nonlinearity, this scheme requires no control fields, and can function as a quantum memory and even a universal quantum gate. It therefore provides a building block for scalable quantum networks based on completely passive photonic devices interconnected and activated solely by single photons.

Refs:
[1] S. Rosenblum, A. S.  Parkins, and B.Dayan, "Photon routing in cavity QED: Beyond the fundamental limit of photon blockade", Phys. Rev. A. 84, 033854 (2011)
[2] I. Shomroni, S. Rosenblum, Y. Lovsky, O. Bechler, G. Guendelman, and B. Dayan, 
"All-optical routing of single photons by a one-atom switch controlled by a single photon", 
Science 345, 903 (2014)