Harnessing spontaneous emission of correlated photon pairs from ladder-type giant atoms

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a method for generating strongly correlated photon pairs using ladder-type giant atoms, avoiding nonlinear media, with potential applications in quantum information processing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to produce correlated photon pairs via ladder-type giant atoms with high efficiency, without requiring nonlinear waveguides.

Findings

Strong photon pair correlations achieved in bidirectional and chiral cases

Directional two-photon transfer enabled by phase encoding

Potential for implementing cascaded quantum systems

Abstract

The realization of correlated multi-photon processes usually depends on the interaction between nonlinear media and atoms. However, the nonlinearity of optical materials is generally weak, making it still very challenging to achieve correlated multi-photon dynamics at the few-photon level. Meanwhile, giant atoms, with their capability for multi-point coupling, which is a novel paradigm in quantum optics, mostly focus on the single photon field. In this work, using the method described in Phys. Rev. Res. 6. 013279 (2024), we reveal that the ladder-type three-level giant atom spontaneously emits strongly correlated photon pairs with high efficiency by designing and optimizing the target function. In addition, by encoding local phases into the optimal coupling sequence, directional two-photon correlated transfer can be achieved. This method does not require a nonlinear waveguide and can be realized in the conventional environment. We show that the photon pairs emitted in both the bidirectional and the chiral case exhibit strong correlation properties in both time and space. Such correlated photon pairs have great potential applications for quantum information processing. For example, numerical results show that our proposal can realize the two-photon mediated cascaded quantum system.