Observation of Photons From an Inhibited Spontaneous Emitter

Published

February 1, 2000

Author(s)

D A. Branning, Alan L. Migdall

Abstract

A fun and timely problem in cavity quantum electrodynamics is the question of whether atoms are actually radiating anything when their spontaneous emission is inhibited by a cavity. Recent theoretical papers have indicated that the answer to this question, counterintuitively, is yes or more accurately, in the quantum-mechanical sense, yes and no. That is, even when spontaneous emission is inhibited by a cavity, there is still a nonzero probability for the energy to be found in the field instead of the atom: the two are in an entangled quantum state that contains both possibilities. We have planned a demonstration of this that will use the process of spontaneous parametric downconversion, in which a pump photon may be split into two lower energy signal and idler photons within a nonlinear crystal. It has already been shown that this process may be frustrated by forming a cavity around the signal and idler modes, in precise analogy to the inhibitedspontaneous emission of atoms, but with the advantage that much larger cavities may be used. We will construct a time-dependent cavity that can be switched on or off in several ns, which is less than the round-trip time of the cavity. By detecting the immediate arrival of photons outside the cavity just after it is switched off, we can catch the downconverter in the act of having sometimes radiated signal and idler photons even when its emission was inhibited by the cavity. This amounts to projecting, or collapsing, the entangled state of the system onto an eigenstate in which only the field contains the energy.

Proceedings Title

Sigma Xi Post Doctoral Poster Presentations, 2000

Conference Dates

February 17-18, 2000

Conference Title

Sigma Xi Web Page

Pub Type

Conferences

Keywords

photons, quantum electrodynamics, spontaneous emission

Citation

Branning, D. and Migdall, A. (2000), Observation of Photons From an Inhibited Spontaneous Emitter, Sigma Xi Post Doctoral Poster Presentations, 2000 (Accessed April 24, 2024)