2015/11/30 by H. Gorniaczyk, C. Tresp, P. Bienias +6 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #physics.atom-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/ncomms12480
published as Nature Communications, 7, 12480 (2016) · 7 pages main text, 3 figures, 2 pages supplemental material
arxiv created 2016/09/14 · arxiv updated 2016/09/15
Mapping the strong interaction between Rydberg atoms onto single photons via electromagnetically induced transparency enables manipulation of light on the single photon level and novel few-photon devices such as all-optical switches and transistors operated by individual photons. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that Stark-tuned Förster resonances can substantially increase this effective interaction between individual photons. This technique boosts the gain of a single-photon transistor to over 100, enhances the non-destructive detection of single Rydberg atoms to a fidelity beyond 0.8, and enables high precision spectroscopy on Rydberg pair states. On top, we achieve a gain larger than 2 with gate photon read-out after the transistor operation. Theory models for Rydberg polariton propagation on Förster resonance and for the projection of the stored spin-wave yield excellent agreement to our data and successfully identify the main decoherence mechanism of the Rydberg transistor, paving the way towards photonic quantum gates.