2019/05/01 by Yu-Ming He, Hui Wang, Can Wang +12 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #cond-mat.mes-hall #physics.atm-clus
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41567-019-0585-6
published as Nature Physics 15, 941-946 (2019) · 17 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication (2019)
arxiv created 2019/05/01 · arxiv updated 2019/12/17
Efficient excitation of a single two-level system usually requires that the driving field is at the same frequency as the atomic transition. However, the scattered laser light in solid-state implementations can dominate over the single photons, imposing an outstanding challenge to perfect single-photon sources. Here, we propose a background-free method using a phase-locked dichromatic electromagnetic field with no spectral overlap with the optical transition for a coherent control of a two-level system, and we demonstrate this method experimentally with a single quantum dot embedded in a micropillar. Single photons generated by pi excitation show a purity of 0.988(1) and indistinguishability of 0.962(6). Further, the phase-coherent nature of the two-color excitation is captured by the resonance-fluorescence intensity dependence on the relative phase between the two pulses. Our two-color excitation method adds a useful toolbox to the study of atom-photon interaction, and the generation of spectrally isolated indistinguishable single photons.