Transient dynamics of the quantum light retrieved from Rydberg polaritons

TL;DR

This paper investigates the transient photon statistics in Rydberg EIT systems, revealing position-dependent autocorrelation effects and demonstrating a method to generate highly antibunched single photons within a pulse.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental and theoretical analysis of transient photon correlations in Rydberg polaritons, enabling efficient single-photon generation from atomic ensembles.

Findings

Autocorrelation varies significantly during pulse transients.

The falling edge of the pulse exhibits lower autocorrelation values.

Selective detection yields single photons with antibunching as low as 0.12.

Abstract

We study the photon statistics of weak coherent pulses propagating through a cold Rydberg atomic ensemble in the regime of Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency. We show experimentally that the value of the second-order autocorrelation function of the transmitted light strongly depends on the position within the pulse and heavily varies during the transients of the pulse. In particular, we show that the falling edge of the transmitted pulse displays much lower values than the rest of the pulse. We derive a theoretical model that quantitatively predicts our results and explains the physical behavior involved. Finally, we use this effect to generate single photons localized within a pulse from the atomic ensemble. We show that by selecting only the last part of the transmitted pulse, the single photons show an antibunching parameter as low as 0.12 and a generation efficiency per trial larger than possible with probabilistic generation schemes with atomic ensembles.