Observation of scalable sub-Poissonian-field lasing in a microlaser

TL;DR

This paper reports the first demonstration of a microlaser with hundreds of atoms achieving sub-Poissonian photon statistics with variance 4dB below the standard quantum limit, scalable to high photon numbers.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable microlaser that produces highly sub-Poissonian light with large photon numbers, advancing quantum light sources.

Findings

Photon-number variance was 4dB below the standard quantum limit.

Intracavity mean photon number was scalable up to 600.

Sub-Poissonian statistics were maintained with many atoms.

Abstract

Sub-Poisson field with much reduced fluctuations in a cavity can boost quantum precision measurements via cavity-enhanced light-matter interactions. Strong coupling between an atom and a cavity mode has been utilized to generate highly sub-Poisson fields. However, a macroscopic number of optical intracavity photons with more than 3dB variance reduction in a setting of laser has not been possible. Here, we report sub-Poisson field lasing in a microlaser operating with hundreds of atoms with well-regulated atom-cavity coupling and interaction time. Its photon-number variance was 4dB below the standard quantum limit while the intracavity mean photon number scalable up to 600. The highly sub-Poisson photon statistics were not deteriorated by simultaneous interaction of a large number of atoms. Our finding suggests an effective pathway to widely scalable quasi-Fock-state lasing at the macroscopic scale.