Investigation of cavity modes and direct observation of Purcell enhancement in 2D photonic crystal defect microcavities

We demonstrate our ability to control and manipulate the optical modes in 2D Photonic Crystal Defect cavities and investigate their coupling to InGaAs self-assembled quantum dots. Our results enable us to probe the nature of individual cavity modes and directly investigate cavity QED phenomena. For the lowest mode volume cavities investigated, consisting of a single missing air hole within a hexagonal lattice, we have measured a clear Purcell enhancement of the light-matter interaction in the weak coupling regime. For QDs on-resonance with localized cavity modes this translates to a shortening of the quantum dot spontaneous emission lifetime by a factor 2 when compared to off-resonance dots.     

Preparation of pseudo-pure states for NMR quantum computing with one ancillary qubit

Light-matter interaction in the strong coupling regime enables light control at the single-photon level. We develop numerical method and analytical expressions to calculate the decay kinetics of an initially excited two-level quantum emitter in dielectric nanostructure and single-mode cavity, respectively. We use these methods to discover the dual effects of disorder on the stronglycoupled system composed of a single quantum dot and a photonic crystal L3 cavity. The quality factor is sensitive to disorder,while the g factor and vacuum Rabi splitting are robust against disorder. A small amount of disorder may either decrease or increase the light localization and the light-matter interaction. Our methods offer flexible and efficient theoretical tools for the investigation of light-matter interaction, especially cavity quantum electrodynamics. Our findings significantly lower the requirements for optimization effort and fabrication precision and open up many promising practical possibilities.     

Quantum correlations between two cavity QED systems coupled by a mechanical resonator

Achieving quantum correlations between two distant systems is a desirable feature for quantum networking. In this work, we study a system composed of two quantum emitter-cavity subsystems spatially separated. A mechanical resonator couples to either both quantum emitters or both cavities leading to quantum correlations between both subsystems such as non-local light-matter dressed states and cavity–cavity normal mode splitting. These indirect couplings can be explained by an effective Hamiltonian for large energy detuning between the mechanical resonator and the atoms/cavities. Moreover, it is found that the optimal conditions of the physical parameters maximize the entanglement of phonon-mediated couplings.     

Modelling air-bridge photonic crystal defects by guided mode expansion

A guided mode expansion treatment is presented for theoretical analysis of air-bridge photonic crystal cavity structures. The optimum choice of waveguide refractive index for the basis states is discussed. The method’s inherent speed is demonstrated with the optimisation of an L3 defect in a hexagonal lattice of circular holes.     

Ultrahigh-Q of the L3 photonic crystal microcavity

In this paper, we theoretically investigate the L3 cavity with three missing holes in the center. They are of great interest for the realization of low threshold laser nanosources and for a strong interaction between the cavity and sources. In order to improve the transmission and Q factor simultaneously of these structure, by reducing unwanted reflection due to mismatch and through minimization of propagation losses, we modified L3 geometry: three missing holes in a line where both lateral displacement of the first hole adjacent to the cavity, d, and their radius, r, were changed. A photonic microcavity with a high Q factor of 1.8741 × 10⁷ and a modal volume V of 0.351 is demonstrated. We demonstrate that the calculated Q factor for the designed cavity increases by a factor of 49 relative to that for a cavity without displaced and reduced air holes, while the modal volume remains almost constant.     

Plasmonic-photonic cavity for high-efficiency single-photon blockade

The generation and manipulation of single photons are crucial in advanced quantum technologies, such as quantum communication and quantum computation devices. High-purity single photons can be generated from classical light using the single-photon blockade(1 PB). However, the efficiency and purity are exclusive in 1 PB, which hinders its practical applications. Here, we show that the resonantly coupled plasmonic-photonic cavity can boost the efficiency of single-photon generation by more than three orders of magnitude compared with that of all-dielectric microcavity. This significant improvement is attributed to two new mechanisms of atom-microcavity coupling after introducing the plasmonic cavity: the formation of a quasi-bound state and the transition to the nonreciprocal regime, due to the destructive interference between the coupling pathways and the nonzero relative phase of the closed-loop coupling, respectively. The quasi-bound state has a relatively small decaying, while its effective coupling strength is significantly enhanced. Suppressing the dissipative component of the effective atom-microcavity coupling in the nonreciprocal regime can further improve single-photon performance, particularly without temporal oscillations. Our study demonstrates the possibility of enhancing the intrinsically low efficiency of 1 PB in low excitation regime, and unveils the novel light-matter interaction in hybrid cavities.     

Early-stage dynamics of light-matter interaction leading to the insulator-to-metal transition in a charge ordered organic crystal

Ultrafast dynamics of the light-matter interaction in a charge-ordered molecular insulator α-(BEDT-TTF)2I3 were studied by pump-probe spectroscopy using few-optical-cycle infrared pulses (pulse width 12 fs). Coherent oscillation of the correlated electrons and subsequent Fano destructive interference with intramolecular vibration were observed in time domain; the results indicated a crucial role for electron-electron interplay in the light-matter interaction leading to the photoinduced insulator-to-metal transition. The qualitative features of this correlated electron motion were reproduced by calculations based on exact many-electron-phonon wave functions.     

Insights into positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy by molecular dynamics simulations

The relationship between free-volume properties measured from positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS) and calculated from molecular dynamics simulations has been investigated for glassy and liquid glycerol in the temperature range 150–400 K. A virtual probing procedure has been developed to retrieve information on the basic free-volume properties of the simulated microstructures, i.e. mean cavity volume and free-volume cavity fractions. Our data leads us to infer on the occurrence of experimentally non-detectable small cavities with mean equivalent radius of 1.8–1.9 Å between 250 and 275 K. The size of these limiting cavities is found to be temperature dependent, being smaller at low temperatures. At high temperatures, above a characteristic PALS temperature Tb2L , the formation of very large cavities is predicted. This finding suggests that, when the dimension of the holes in the system exceeds a given value, the PALS measurements become unable to catch the complete structural information and phenomena of dynamical origin enter into play in the PALS signal decay. The calculated number of cavities is found to be almost independent on the temperature from the glassy up to the liquid phase, thus furnishing a certain support to theoretical models proposed to evaluate the free-volume cavity fractions.     

Effect of coupling between passenger compartment and trunk of a car on coupled system natural frequencies using acoustic frequency response function

Conventional numerical techniques, used to study the acoustics of a car passenger cabin, treat the cabin as an isolated cavity excited by the cavity boundaries. Realistically, other cavity volumes such as the trunk communicate with the cabin through the holes in the parcel shelf of the car. An extended acoustic model of a car is formed by the cavity volumes of the passenger compartment and the trunk as well as air leakages through the holes provided for electrical devices and ventilation on the parcel shelf. In this study, the dynamic influence of air leakages between the passenger and trunk compartments on the first and second coupled system modes was investigated experimentally using acoustic frequency response function. The response to the acoustic excitation was measured for four different configurations of trim and holes of the parcel shelf. The natural frequencies of the first and second coupled system modes increased with increasing holes size with and without the trim of the parcel shelf. The experimental results were in good agreement with the reported results of coupling effects of double cavities connected by a neck. In the low frequency region since the wavelength is longer compared to the holes dimension, these holes act as point sources.     

Effect of disorder on slow light velocity in optical slow-wave structures

Slow-wave optical structures such as coupled photonic crystal cavities, coupled microresonators, and similar coupled-resonator optical waveguides are being proposed for slowing light because of the nature of their dispersion relationship. Since the group velocity becomes small, slow light and enhanced light-matter interaction may be observed at the edges of the waveguiding band. We derive a model of the effects of disorder on slow light in such structures, obtaining a relationship between the root-mean-square variation in the coupling coefficients and how slow the light is at the band edge.     

Photonic crystal cavities and integrated optical devices

This paper gives a brief introduction to our recent works on photonic crystal (PhC) cavities and related integrated optical structures and devices. Theoretical background and numerical methods for simulation of PhC cavities are first presented. Based on the theoretical basis, two relevant quantities, the cavity mode volume and the quality factor are discussed. Then the methods of fabrication and characterization of silicon PhC slab cavities are introduced. Several types of PhC cavities are presented, such as the usual L3 missing-hole cavity, the new concept waveguide-like parallel-hetero cavity, and the low-index nanobeam cavity. The advantages and disadvantages of each type of cavity are discussed. This will help the readers to decide which type of PhC cavities to use in particular applications. Furthermore, several integrated optical devices based on PhC cavities, such as optical filters, channel-drop filters, optical switches, and optical logic gates are described in both the working principle and operation characteristics. These devices designed and realized in our group demonstrate the wide range of applications of PhC cavities and offer possible solutions to some integrated optical problems.     

Evanescently coupled resonance in surface plasmon enhanced transmission

The optical transmission through subwavelength holes in metal films can be enhanced by several orders of magnitude by enabling interaction of the incident light with independent surface plasmon (SP) modes on either side of the film. Here, we show that this transmission is boosted by an additional factor of 10 when the energies of the SP modes on both sides are matched. These results, confirmed by a three-dimensional theoretical analysis, give a totally new understanding of the phenomenon of SP enhanced transmission. It is found that the holes behave like subwavelength cavities for the evanescent waves coupling the SPs on either side of the film. In this unusual device, the reflection at either end of the cavity is provided by the SP modes which act as frequency dependent mirrors.     

Indirect strong coupling regime between a quantum emitter and a cavity mediated by a mechanical resonator

Achieving strong coupling between light and matter is usually a challenge in Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics (cQED), especially in solid state systems. For this reason is useful taking advantage of alternative approaches to reach this regime, and then, generate reliable quantum polaritons. In this work we study a system composed of a quantized single mode of a mechanical resonator interacting linearly with both a single mode cavity and a quantum two-level system. In particular, we focus on the behavior of the indirect light-matter interaction when the phonon mode interfaces both parts. By diagonalization of the Hamiltonian and computing the density matrix in a master equation approach, we evidence several features of strong coupling between photons and matter excitations. For large energy detuning between the cavity and the mechanical resonator it is obtained a phonon-dispersive effective Hamiltonian which is able to retrieve much of the physics of the conventional Jaynes–Cummings model (JCM). In order to characterize this mediated coupling, we make a quantitative comparison between both models and analyze light-matter entanglement and purity of the system leading to similar results in cQED.     

Photonic realization of the quantum Rabi model

We realize a photonic analog simulator of the quantum Rabi model, based on light transport in femtosecond-laser-written waveguide superlattices, which provides an experimentally accessible test bed to explore the physics of light-matter interaction in the deep strong coupling regime. Our optical setting enables us to visualize dynamical regimes not yet accessible in cavity or circuit quantum electrodynamics, such as the bouncing of photon number wave packets in parity chains of Hilbert space.     

Hidden Vacuum Rabi Oscillations:Dynamical Quantum Superpositions of On/Off Interaction between a Single Quantum Dot and a Microcavity

We show that it is possible to realize quantum superpositions of switched-on and-off strong light-matter interaction in a single quantum dot-semiconductor microcavity system.Such superpositions enable the observation of counterintuitive quantum conditional dynamics effects.Situations are possible where cavity photons as well as the emitter luminescence display exponential decay but their joint detection probability exhibits vacuum Rabi oscillations.Remarkably,these quantum correlations are also present in the nonequilibrium steady state spectra of such coherently driven dissipative quantum systems.     

Optimized design for 2 × 10 ultra-high Q silicon photonic crystal cavities

We propose an optimized design for the measurement in transmission of photonic crystal width-modulated line-defect cavities. By controlling the number of holes and rows that separate the cavity from the coupling waveguides, the measured quality factor of the cavity can be tuned to be close to the unloaded one. In the case of a weakly coupled cavity, we measure an ultra-high quality factor that reaches a value of 2 × 10⁶. This value is not obtained for the largest spacing but for an intermediate one. This counter-intuitive result is supported by 3D-FDTD modeling.     

A scheme for approximate conditional teleportation of entangled two-mode cavity state without Bell state measurement

An alternative scheme to approximately conditionally teleport entangled two-mode cavity state without Bell state measurement in cavity QED is proposed. The scheme is based on the resonant interaction of a ladder-type three-level atom with two bimodal cavities. The entangled cavity state is reconstructed with only one atom interacting with the two cavities successively.     

Analysis of a teleportation scheme involving cavity field states in a linear superposition of Fock states

We analyse a teleportation scheme of cavity field states. The experimental sketch discussed makes use of cavity quantum electrodynamics involving the interaction of Rydberg atoms with superconducting (micromaser) cavities as well as with classical microwave (Ramsey) cavities. In our scheme the Ramsey cavities and the atoms play the role of auxiliary systems used to teleport a field state, which is formed by a linear superposition of vacuum |∅〉 and the one-photon state |1〉, from a micromaser cavity to another.     

High-Q microfluidic cavities in silicon-based two-dimensional photonic crystal structures

We demonstrate postprocessed microfluidic double-heterostructure cavities in silicon-based photonic crystal slab waveguides. The cavity structure is realized by selective fluid infiltration of air holes using a glass microtip, resulting in a local change of the average refractive index of the photonic crystal. The microcavities are probed by evanescent coupling from a silica nanowire. An intrinsic quality factor of 57,000 has been derived from our measurements, representing what we believe to be the largest value observed in microfluidic photonic crystal cavities to date.     

Generation of four-photon W state via cavity QED

This paper proposes an alternative scheme for generating four-photon W state via cavity QED. The scheme bases on the resonant interaction of a A-type three level atom with two bimodal cavities. The detection of atom collapses the cavity to the desired state. Comparing with previous schemes, the advantage of this scheme is that the interaction time can be greatly shortened since it uses the resonant interaction between atom and cavities. Moreover, the proposed scheme is more experimentally feasible than the previous ones.