Partially Nondestructive Continuous Detection of Individual Traveling Optical Photons
We report the continuous and partially nondestructive measurement of optical photons. For a weak light pulse traveling through a slow-light optical medium (signal), the associated atomic-excitation component is detected by another light beam (probe) with the aid of an optical cavity. We observe stro...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
American Physical Society
2016
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100970 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4404-6620 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8051-1844 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2486-4164 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9786-0538 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1521-5365 |
| Summary: | We report the continuous and partially nondestructive measurement of optical photons. For a weak light pulse traveling through a slow-light optical medium (signal), the associated atomic-excitation component is detected by another light beam (probe) with the aid of an optical cavity. We observe strong correlations of g[(2) over sp] = 4.4(5) between the transmitted signal and probe photons. The observed (intrinsic) conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency ranges between 13% and 1% (65% and 5%) for a signal transmission range of 2% to 35%, at a typical time resolution of 2.5 μs. The maximal observed (intrinsic) device nondestructive quantum efficiency, defined as the product of the conditional nondestructive quantum efficiency and the signal transmission, is 0.5% (2.4%). The normalized cross-correlation function violates the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, confirming the nonclassical character of the correlations. |
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