Chirped laser pulses to excite quantum dots
- Reiter
A new review article in Advanced Quantum Technologies by the Reiter group
When someone speaks monotonously, in physics we would say they use a single frequency. Singing birds use many frequencies and sometimes even sound packets. Thus, birds are chirping. This intriguing concept can be applied to lasers as well. While a constant frequency is often employed over a laser pulse duration, there's another fascinating approach—chirping laser pulses. This means the laser pulse dynamically changes its frequency or phase during the pulse.
When such a chirped laser pulse interacts with a quantum system like a quantum dot, this leads to an excitation. Most interestingly, this excitation is robust, meaning it also works well even if the pulse parameters are slightly fluctuating. This makes chirped laser pulses attractive for usage in quantum state preparation for photon generation.
In this paper, we review the interaction of chirped laser pulses with quantum dots. Additionally, we explore the generation of chirped pulses in the lab, showcasing techniques such as grating stretchers and chirped fiber Bragg gratings. We discuss different applications and give an outlook into the future use of chirped pulses in quantum technologies.
The paper was led by the photonics group in Innsbruck .