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One efficient approach for generating single photons is based on using a two-level atom, which inherently cannot emit more than one photon at the time. As early as the 1980s, this quantum feature was identified as the gateway to creating single photon sources (SPS's), where a regular excitation sequence would produce a stream of photons with photon number fluctuations below the shot noise. Such an...
A current challenge and trend in optical sciences is to extend the toolbox generated from experiments with single emitters and single photons towards interfacing photons with a well-defined number of quantum emitters. The resulting complex optical network would enable studies of many-body quantum optical phenomena and could lend itself to quantum simulations. However, common light-matter interfaces...
Semiconductor quantum dots are useful emitters in various contexts. They are, for example, a bright source of photons because of the possibility to generate multiple excitons within one quantum dot and subsequently obtain the emission of multiple photons upon each excitation. In practice, however, such multiphoton emission is often inefficient due to fast nonradiative decay channels such as Auger...
The achievements of super-resolution microscopy beyond the diffraction barrier were honored by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014. One of the common super-resolution approaches employs pinpointing the position of single fluorophores, via localizing the centers of the point-spread function from each individual label molecule. In this method, the fluorophore location can be determined with arbitrary...
Organic dye molecules have been used in great many scientific and technological applications. Among these, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) behave very favourably as quantum emitters when embedded in organic crystals at temperatures below 4K. PAHs can serve as solid-state emitters with remarkable optical properties such as near-unity quantum efficiency and high photostability. However, transitions...
We exploit concepts from plasmonics and cavity quantum electrodynamics to devise new optical antennas for producing ultrabright single-photon streams. In combination with planar dielectric antenna, nearly every emitted single photon can be collected.
Recent theoretical and experimental results indicate that focused light and plasmonic antennas represent an effective approach to improve light-matter interaction at a fundamental level. This opportunity relies on the fact that the coupling is greatly enhanced when photons are concentrated below the emitter cross-section [1]. Plasmonic antennas are metal nanostructures that boost the absorption and...
Since its first development and applications in the early 1990s, single molecule detection has become a powerful tool for a wide range of studies, ranging from biophysics to quantum optics. However, this approach has been limited so far to species with high fluorescence quantum yield. Over the past few years, we have developed extinction detection and spectroscopy as an alternative to fluorescence...
Although single ions in electromagnetic traps have been studied in vacuum for about three decades, seeing single ions embedded in solid matrices has remained elusive. The most stable and well-understood ions are the rare earths with examples such as Eu3+, Er3+, and Nd3+. Detection of such emitters is mainly hampered by a weak transition dipole moment and thus a low detection signal. Furthermore, strong...
Single-photon sources have been discussed as the building blocks of quantum cryptography, optical quantum computation, spectroscopy, and metrology. However, when using sources based on single emitters, the success of these proposals depends on the ability to achieve near-unity collection efficiency into well-defined modes. Some of the current state-of-the-art efforts aimed at achieving these criteria...
We combined high resolution laser spectroscopy and microscopy to identify individual molecules in two independent microscopes. Then the Stark effect was exploited to tune the transition frequencies of the molecules and thus obtain indistinguishable single photons.
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