Inducing disallowed two-atom transitions with temporally entangled photons

Two uncoupled two-level atoms cannot be jointly excited by classical light under general circumstances, due to destructive interference of excitation pathways in two-photon absorption. However, with temporally entangled light, two-atom excitation is shown possible. Photons arising from three-level cascade decay are intrinsically ordered in time of emission. This field correlation induces a joint resonance in the two-atom excitation probability via suppression of one of the time-ordered excitation pathways. The relative gain in two-photon absorption increases with the time-frequency entanglement.