Person:

Hofferberth, Sebastian

We demonstrate a fiber-optical switch that is activated at tiny energies corresponding to a few hundred optical photons per pulse. This is achieved by simultaneously confining both photons and a small lasercooled ensemble of atoms inside the microscopic hollow core of a single-mode photonic-crystal fiber and using quantum optical techniques for generating slow light propagation and large nonlinear interaction between light beams.

We measure the two-point density correlation function of freely expanding quasicondensates in the weakly interacting quasi-one-dimensional (1D) regime. While initially suppressed in the trap, density fluctuations emerge gradually during expansion as a result of initial phase fluctuations present in the trapped quasicondensate. Asymptotically, they are governed by the thermal coherence length of the system. Our measurements take place in an intermediate regime where density correlations are related to near-field diffraction effects and anomalous correlations play an important role. Comparison with a recent theoretical approach described by Imambekov et al. yields good agreement with our experimental results and shows that density correlations can be used for thermometry of quasicondensates.

The realization of strong nonlinear interactions between individual light quanta (photons) is a long-standing goal in optical science and engineering, being of both fundamental and technological significance. In conventional optical materials, the nonlinearity at light powers corresponding to single photons is negligibly weak. Here we demonstrate a medium that is nonlinear at the level of individual quanta, exhibiting strong absorption of photon pairs while remaining transparent to single photons. The quantum nonlinearity is obtained by coherently coupling slowly propagating photons to strongly interacting atomic Rydberg states in a cold, dense atomic gas. Our approach paves the way for quantum-by-quantum control of light fields, including single-photon switching, all-optical deterministic quantum logic and the realization of strongly correlated many-body states of light.

We investigate theoretically the evolution of the two-point density correlation function of a low-dimensional ultracold Bose gas after release from a tight transverse confinement. In the course of expansion thermal and quantum fluctuations present in the trapped systems transform into density fluctuations. For the case of free ballistic expansion relevant to current experiments, we present simple analytical relations between the spectrum of “density ripples” and the correlation functions of the original confined systems. We analyze several physical regimes, including weakly and strongly interacting one-dimensional (1D) Bose gases and two-dimensional (2D) Bose gases below the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition. For weakly interacting 1D Bose gases, we obtain an explicit analytical expression for the spectrum of density ripples which can be used for thermometry. For 2D Bose gases below the BKT transition, we show that for sufficiently long expansion times the spectrum of the density ripples has a self-similar shape controlled only by the exponent of the first-order correlation function. This exponent can be extracted by analyzing the evolution of the spectrum of density ripples as a function of the expansion time.