Control of the electromagnetic environment of a quantum emitter by shaping the vacuum field in a coupled-cavity system

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to ultrafastly control the coupling between a quantum emitter and the electromagnetic field by modulating the vacuum field in a coupled-cavity system, enabling precise quantum control without perturbing the emitter.

Contribution

It presents a novel scheme for on/off switching of emitter-field coupling in cavity QED via vacuum field modulation, without perturbing the emitter or causing photon frequency chirps.

Findings

Enables ultrafast control of emitter-field coupling.

Allows shaping of single-photon pulses for quantum information.

Proposes feasible implementations with photonic crystals and microwave circuits.

Abstract

We propose a scheme for the ultrafast control of the emitter-field coupling rate in cavity quantum electrodynamics. This is achieved by the control of the vacuum field seen by the emitter through a modulation of the optical modes in a coupled-cavity structure. The scheme allows the on/off switching of the coupling rate without perturbing the emitter and without introducing frequency chirps on the emitted photons. It can be used to control the shape of single-photon pulses for high-fidelity quantum state transfer, to control Rabi oscillations and as a gain-modulation method in lasers. We discuss two possible experimental implementations based on photonic crystal cavities and on microwave circuits.