Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 7 July 2006:
Vol. 313. no. 5783, pp. 74 - 77
DOI: 10.1126/science.1127676
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Reports

A High-Brightness Source of Narrowband, Identical-Photon Pairs

James K. Thompson,1* Jonathan Simon,2 Huanqian Loh,1 Vladan Vuletic1

We generated narrowband pairs of nearly identical photons at a rate of 5 x 104 pairs per second from a laser-cooled atomic ensemble inside an optical cavity. A two-photon interference experiment demonstrated that the photons could be made 90% indistinguishable, a key requirement for quantum information-processing protocols. Used as a conditional single-photon source, the system operated near the fundamental limits on recovery efficiency (57%), Fourier transform–limited bandwidth, and pair-generation-rate–limited suppression of two-photon events (factor of 33 below the Poisson limit). Each photon had a spectral width of 1.1 megahertz, ideal for interacting with atomic ensembles that form the basis of proposed quantum memories and logic.

1 Department of Physics, MIT–Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
2 Department of Physics, MIT–Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Harvard University, 17 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jkthomps{at}mit.edu

Read the Full Text


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Functional Quantum Nodes for Entanglement Distribution over Scalable Quantum Networks.
C.-W. Chou, J. Laurat, H. Deng, K. S. Choi, H. de Riedmatten, D. Felinto, and H. J. Kimble (2007)
Science 316, 1316-1320
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »


To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)