2013/03/20 by Zhan Zheng, Zheng, Zhan, Pablo L. Saldanha +5
Chemistry · Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Optics (physics.optics) #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Various Chemistry Research Topics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1303.5043
openalex publication_date 2013/03/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study in this paper the efficiency of different two-photon states of light to induce the simultaneous excitation of two atoms of different kinds when the sum of the energies of the two photons matches the sum of the energies of the two atomic transitions, while no photons are resonant with each individual transition. We find that entangled two-photon states produced by an atomic cascade are indeed capable of enhancing by a large factor the simultaneous excitation probability as compared to uncorrelated photons, as predicted some years ago by Muthukrishnan et al, but that several non-entangled, separable, correlated states, produced either by an atomic cascade or parametric down conversion, or even appropriate combinations of coher- ent states, have comparable efficiencies. We show that the key ingredient for the increase of simultaneous excitation probability is the presence of strong frequency anti-correlation and not time correlation nor time-frequency entanglement.