2016/05/24 by Zhifan Zhou, Ulrich Vogl, Zhou, Zhifan +11
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Optics (physics.optics) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum optics and atomic interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1605.07257
openalex publication_date 2016/05/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Fundamentally, the dynamics of micro-macro transitions is instrumental to understanding the process of quantum-to-classical transitions; technologically, it can also facilitate the detection of the microscopic signals in quantum experiments via convenient detectors. Here, we demonstrate a scheme to characterize micro-macro transitions based on a four-wave mixing linear optical amplification process in a hot rubidium vapor. The linear optical amplifier provides a large optical gain of 107 for injected single-photon-level pulses, enabling photon-number-resolving detection by average via non-single-photon counting detectors with a large dynamic range. The scheme exhibits strong dispersion which is sensitive to the input's change at the single-photon level, resulting in the group-velocity delay time scaling with 1/√(N), where N is the average input photon number. The output probe and conjugate modes have different coefficients of this 1/√(N) scaling, indicating the coefficient can serve as an efficient parameter to characterize the specified micro-macro transitions. The demonstrated results are generally applicable for quantum detection and optical signal processing in light-atom interfaces. Furthermore, the present system is suitable for the study of relevant time-resolved dynamics of the quantum-to-classical transitions.