Photon blockade in an optical cavity with one trapped atom
Photon blockade in an optical cavity with one trapped atom
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DOI：
10.1038/nature03804
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发表时间：
2005-07-07
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Kimble, HJ
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Birnbaum, KM;Boca, A;Kimble, HJ
在较低温度下，足够小的金属(1)和半导体(2)器件表现出‘库仑阻塞’效应，其中通过器件的电荷传输是在逐个电子的基础上发生的(3)。例如，如果金属岛上的单个电子的充电能量大大超过热能，那么该岛上的单个电子就可以阻止另一个电子的流动。对于光在光学系统中的传输，已经提出了类似的“光子阻挡”效应；这涉及到非线性光学腔中的光子-光子相互作用(4-13)。本文报道了在强原子腔耦合(14)条件下，观察到包含一个囚禁原子的光腔传输光的光子阻挡现象。第一光子对原子-腔系统的激发阻止了第二光子的传输，从而将入射的泊松光子流转换为泊松反聚束的光子流。对透射场的光子统计的测量证实了这一点。我们对光子阻塞的观察代表了对传统非线性光学和激光物理的进步，进入了一个涉及原子和光子的动力学过程逐一进行的区域。
At low temperatures, sufficiently small metallic(1) and semiconductor(2) devices exhibit the 'Coulomb blockade' effect, in which charge transport through the device occurs on an electron-by-electron basis(3). For example, a single electron on a metallic island can block the flow of another electron if the charging energy of the island greatly exceeds the thermal energy. The analogous effect of 'photon blockade' has been proposed for the transport of light through an optical system; this involves photon-photon interactions in a nonlinear optical cavity(4-13). Here we report observations of photon blockade for the light transmitted by an optical cavity containing one trapped atom, in the regime of strong atom cavity coupling(14). Excitation of the atom-cavity system by a first photon blocks the transmission of a second photon, thereby converting an incident poissonian stream of photons into a subpoissonian, anti-bunched stream. This is confirmed by measurements of the photon statistics of the transmitted field. Our observations of photon blockade represent an advance over traditional nonlinear optics and laser physics, into a regime with dynamical processes involving atoms and photons taken one-by-one.