arXiv subjects

F. P. Laussy

Publications and source records attributed to F. P. Laussy.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Multiphoton Emission

We describe the emission, detection and structure of multiphoton states of light. We include the effect of frequency filtering, which describes, at a fundamental level, physical detection of a quantum emitter. The case of the spontaneous emission of Fock states is treated fully and analytically. We stress this picture by contrasting it to the numerical simulation of two-photon bundles emitted from a two-level system in a cavity. We show that dynamical factors exist that allow for a more robust multiphoton emission than spontaneous emission. We also describe how this relates to thermal light.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Conventional and unconventional photon statistics

We show how the photon statistics emitted by a large variety of light-matter systems under weak coherent driving can be understood, to lowest order in the driving, in the framework of an admixture of (or interference between) a squeezed state and a coherent state, with the resulting state accounting for all bunching and antibunching features. One can further identify two mechanisms that produce resonances for the photon correlations: i) conventional statistics describes cases that involve a particular quantum level or set of levels in the excitation/emission processes with interferences occurring to all orders in the photon numbers, while unconventional statistics describes cases where the driving laser is far from resonance with any level and the interference occurs for a particular number of photons only, yielding stronger correlations but only for a definite number of photons. Such an understanding and classification allows for a comprehensive and transparent description of the photon statistics from a wide range of disparate systems, where optimum conditions for various types of photon correlations can be found and realized.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Quasi-Chiral Interactions between Quantum Emitters at the Nanoscale

We present a combined classical and quantum electrodynamics description of the coupling between two circularly-polarized quantum emitters held above a metal surface supporting surface plasmons. Depending on their position and their natural frequency, the emitter-emitter interactions evolve from being reciprocal to nonreciprocal, which makes the system a highly tunable platform for chiral coupling at the nanoscale. By relaxing the stringent material and geometrical constraints for chirality, we explore the interplay between coherent and dissipative coupling mechanisms in the system. Thus, we reveal a quasi-chiral regime in which its quantum optical properties are governed by its subradiant state, giving rise to extremely sharp spectral features and strong photon correlations.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2018

Photon number-resolved measurement of an exciton-polariton condensate

We measure the full photon-number distribution emitted from a Bose condensate of microcavity exciton-polaritons confined in a micropillar cavity. The statistics are acquired by means of a photonnumber resolving transition edge sensor. We directly observe that the photon-number distribution evolves with the non-resonant optical excitation power from geometric to quasi-Poissonian statistics, which is canonical for a transition from a thermal to a coherent state. Moreover, the photon-number distribution allows evaluating the higher-order photon correlations, shedding further light on the coherence formation and phase transition of the polariton condensate. The experimental data is analyzed in terms of thermal coherent states which allows one to directly extract the thermal and coherent fraction from the measured distributions. These results pave the way for a full understanding of the contribution of interactions in light-matter condensates in the coherence buildup at threshold.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2017

Kinetic Monte Carlo Approach to Non-equilibrium Bosonic Systems

We consider the use of a Kinetic Monte Carlo approach for the description of non-equilibrium bosonic systems, taking non-resonantly excited exciton-polariton condensates and bosonic cascade lasers as examples. In the former case, the considered approach allows the study of the cross-over between incoherent and coherent regimes, which represents the formation of a quasi-condensate that forms purely from the action of energy relaxation processes rather than interactions between the condensing particles themselves. In the latter case, we show that a bosonic cascade can theoretically develop an output coherent state.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2017

Structure of the Harmonic Oscillator in the space of $n$-particle Glauber correlators

We map the Hilbert space of the quantum Harmonic oscillator to the space of Glauber's $n$th-order intensity correlators, in effect showing "the correlations between the correlators" for a random sampling of the quantum states. In particular, we show how the popular $g^{(2)}$ function is correlated to the mean population and how a recurrent criterion to identify single-particle states or emitters, namely $g^{(2)}<1/2$, is incorrect as states exist that satisfy this condition with average population larger than one. Our charting of the Hilbert space allows to capture its structure in a simpler and physically more intuitive way that can be used to classify quantum sources by surveying which territory they can access.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

Exciting with Quantum Light. I. Exciting an harmonic oscillator

We start a series of studies of the excitation of an optical target by quantum light. In this first part, we introduce the problematic and address the first case of interest, that of exciting the quantum harmonic oscillator, corresponding to, e.g., a single-mode passive cavity or a non-interacting bosonic field. We introduce a mapping of the Hilbert space that allows to chart usefully the accessible regions. We then consider the quantum excitation from single photon sources in the form of a two-level system under various regimes of (classical) pumping: incoherent, coherent and in the Mollow triplet regime. We close this first opus with an overview of the material to be covered in the subsequent papers.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

Exciting with Quantum Light. II. Exciting a two-level system

We study the excitation of a two-level system (2LS) by quantum light, thereby bringing our previous studies~(see part~I. of this series) to a target that is quantum itself. While there is no gain for the quantum state of the target as compared to driving it with classical light, its dynamical features, such as antibunching, can be improved. We propose a chain of two-level systems, i.e., setting the emission of each 2LS as the driving source of the following one, as an arrangement to provide better single-photon sources. At a fundamental level, we discuss the notion of strong-coupling between quantum light from a source and its target, and the several versions of the Mollow triplet that follow from various types of driving light. We discuss the Heitler effect of antibunched photons from the scattered light off a laser.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

The colored Hanbury Brown--Twiss effect

The Hanbury Brown--Twiss effect is one of the celebrated phenomenologies of modern physics that accommodates equally well classical (interferences of waves) and quantum (correlations between indistinguishable particles) interpretations. The effect was discovered in the late thirties with a basic observation of Hanbury Brown that radio-pulses from two distinct antennas generate signals on the oscilloscope that wiggle similarly to the naked eye. When Hanbury Brown and his mathematician colleague Twiss took the obvious step to propose bringing the effect in the optical range, they met with considerable opposition as single-photon interferences were deemed impossible. The Hanbury Brown--Twiss effect is nowadays universally accepted and, being so fundamental, embodies many subtleties of our understanding of the wave/particle dual nature of light. Thanks to a novel experimental technique, we report here a generalized version of the Hanbury Brown--Twiss effect to include the frequency of the detected light, or, from the particle point of view, the energy of the detected photons. In addition to the known tendencies of indistinguishable photons to arrive together on the detector, we find that photons of different colors present the opposite characteristic of avoiding each others. We postulate that fermions can be similarly brought to exhibit positive (boson-like) correlations by frequency filtering.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

Polaritonic Rabi and Josephson Oscillations

The dynamics of coupled condensates is a wide-encompassing problem with relevance to superconductors, BECs in traps, superfluids, etc. Here, we provide a unified picture of this fundamental problem that includes i) detuning of the free energies, ii) different self-interaction strengths and iii) finite lifetime of the modes. At such, this is particularly relevant for the dynamics of polaritons, both for their internal dynamics between their light and matter constituents, as well as for the more conventional dynamics of two spatially separated condensates. Polaritons are short-lived, interact only through their material fraction and are easily detuned. At such, they bring several variations to their atomic counterpart. We show that the combination of these parameters results in important twists to the phenomenology of the Josephson effect, such as the behaviour of the relative phase (running or oscillating) or the occurrence of self-trapping. We undertake a comprehensive stability analysis of the fixed points on a normalized Bloch sphere, that allows us to provide a generalized criterion to identify the Rabi and Josephson regimes in presence of detuning and decay.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2015

Quantum statistics of bosonic cascades

Bosonic cascades formed by lattices of equidistant energy levels sustaining radiative transitions between nearest layers are promising for the generation of coherent terahertz radiation. We show how, also for the light emitted by the condensates in the visible range, they introduce new regimes of emission. Namely, the quantum statistics of bosonic cascades exhibit super-bunching plateaus. This demonstrates further potentialities of bosonic cascade lasers for the engineering of quantum properties of light useful for imaging applications.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2015

Exciting polaritons with quantum light

We discuss the excitation of polaritons---strongly-coupled states of light and matter---by quantum light, instead of the usual laser or thermal excitation. As one illustration of the new horizons thus opened, we introduce Mollow spectroscopy, a theoretical concept for a spectroscopic technique that consists in scanning the output of resonance fluorescence onto an optical target, from which weak nonlinearities can be read with high precision even in strongly dissipative environments.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2015

Optimization of photon correlations by frequency filtering

Photon correlations are a cornerstone of Quantum Optics. Recent works [NJP 15 025019, 033036 (2013), PRA 90 052111 (2014)] have shown that by keeping track of the frequency of the photons, rich landscapes of correlations are revealed. Stronger correlations are usually found where the system emission is weak. Here, we characterize both the strength and signal of such correlations, through the introduction of the 'frequency resolved Mandel parameter'. We study a plethora of nonlinear quantum systems, showing how one can substantially optimize correlations by combining parameters such as pumping, filtering windows and time delay.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2014

Spanning the full Poincaré sphere with polariton Rabi oscillations

We propose theoretically and demonstrate experimentally a generation of light pulses whose polarization varies temporally to cover selected areas of the Poincaré sphere with tunable swirling speed and total duration (1 ps and 10 ps respectively in our implementation). The effect relies on the Rabi oscillations of two polarized fields in the strong coupling regime, excited by two counter-polarized and delayed pulses. The interferences of the oscillating fields result in the precession of the Stokes vector of the emitted light while polariton lifetime imbalance results in its drift from a circle on the sphere of controllable radius to a single point at long times. The positioning of the initial and final states allows to engineer the type of polarization spanning, including a full sweeping of the Poincaré sphere. The universality and simplicity of the scheme should allow for the deployment of time varying polarization fields at a technologically exploitable level.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2014

Ultrafast control of Rabi oscillations in a polariton condensate

We report the experimental observation and control of space and time-resolved light-matter Rabi oscillations in a microcavity. Our setup precision and the system coherence are so high that coherent control can be implemented with amplification or switching off of the oscillations and even erasing of the polariton density by optical pulses. The data is reproduced by a fundamental quantum optical model with excellent accuracy, providing new insights on the key components that rule the polariton dynamics.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2013

Emitters of $N$-photon bundles

We propose a scheme based on the coherent excitation of a two-level system in a cavity to generate an ultrabright CW and focused source of quantum light that comes in groups (bundles) of $N$ photons, for an integer $N$ tunable with the frequency of the exciting laser. We define a new quantity, the \emph{purity} of $N$-photon emission, to describe the percentage of photons emitted in bundles, thus bypassing the limitations of Glauber correlation functions. We focus on the case $1\le N\le3$ and show that close to 100% of two-photon emission and 90% of three-photon emission is within reach of state of the art cavity QED samples. The statistics of the bundles emission shows that various regimes---from $N$-photon lasing to $N$-photon guns---can be realized. This is evidenced through generalized correlation functions that extend the standard definitions to the multi-photon level.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2012

Two-photon spectra of quantum emitters

We apply our recently developed theory of frequency-filtered and time-resolved N-photon correlations to study the two-photon spectra of a variety of systems of increasing complexity: single mode emitters with two limiting statistics (one harmonic oscillator or a two-level system) and the various combinations that arise from their coupling. We consider both the linear and nonlinear regimes under incoherent excitation. We find that even the simplest systems display a rich dynamics of emission, not accessible by simple single photon spectroscopy. In the strong coupling regime, novel two-photon emission processes involving virtual states are revealed. Furthermore, two general results are unraveled by two-photon correlations with narrow linewidth detectors: i) filtering induced bunching and ii) breakdown of the semi-classical theory. We show how to overcome this shortcoming in a fully-quantized picture.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2011

Generation of two identical photons from a quantum dot in a microcavity

We propose and characterize a two-photon emitter in a highly polarised, monochromatic and directional beam, realized by means of a quantum dot embedded in a linearly polarized cavity. In our scheme, the cavity frequency is tuned to half the frequency of the biexciton (two excitons with opposite spins) and largely detuned from the excitons thanks to the large biexciton binding energy. We show how the emission can be Purcell enhanced by several orders of magnitude into the two-photon channel for available experimental systems.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗