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Department of Physics

Advancing excitation schemes for single-photon generation

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  • Reiter
Left: A sketch of a quantum system containing levels marked by black vertial lines connected by orange and red arrows. Right: Experimental data showing on oscillating curve with blue dots and a saturating behaviour with red dots © Yusuf Karli ​/​ University of Cambridge
The stimulated adiabatic rapid passage (sARP) scheme: A sketch of the involved energy levels and transitions. While photon counts from Rabi rotations exhibit an oscillating behavior as a function of pulse strength, photon counts under the sARP protocol are robust and do not fluctuate.
A new article in Appl. Phys. Lett by the Reiter group

When generating single photons, the excitation scheme plays a crucial role. Over the years, various excitation schemes have been developed, each offering distinct advantages and facing specific challenges. In our latest work, we combine two well-established approaches to leverage their strengths: chirped excitation and the detour approach.

Chirped excitation is known for its robustness against fluctuations in pulse parameters, ensuring more stable operation. The detour approach involves addressing a quantum state through an auxiliary state using a stimulation pulse. By combing these techniques, we introduce a novel excitation scheme called sARP (stimulated Adiabatic Rapid Passage).

Our findings demonstrate that the sARP protocol holds significant potential for applications in quantum cryptographic protocols, including quantum key distribution and quantum coin flipping. These protocols are essential for enabling secure communication in future quantum networks.

The work was led by Yusuf Karli and the photonics group at University of Innsbruck within  collaboration with the semiconductor division from JKU Linz , the Ultrafast Optics group from Jena and the Quantum Communication Systems group in Berlin.

The paper was selected as Featured Article.

It is part of the Special Collection: Quantum Networks.

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