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arXiv · quant-ph/0503186

Quantum Theory for Generation of Nonclassical Photon Pairs by a Medium with Coherent Atomic Memory

Abstract

We present a fully quantum mechanical treatment of recent experiments on creation of collective quantum memory and generation of non-classically correlated photon pairs from an atomic ensemble via the protocol of Duan et al. [Nature {\bf 414,} 413(2001)]. The temporal evolution of photon numbers, photon statistics and cross-correlation between the Stokes and anti-Stokes fields is found by solving the equation of motion for atomic spin-wave excitations. We consider a low-finesse cavity model with collectively enhanced signal-to-noise ratio, which remains still considerably large in the free-space limit. Our results describe analytically the dependence of quantum correlations on spin decoherence time and time-delay between the write and read lasers and reproduce the observed data very well including the generated pulse shapes, strong violation of Cauchy-Schwarz inequality and conditional generation of anti-Stokes single-photon pulse. The theory we developed may serve as a basic approach for quantum description of storage and retrieval of quantum information, especially when the statistical properties of non-classical pulses are studied.

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Narek Sisakyan, Yuri Malakyan. 2005-03-23. Quantum Theory for Generation of Nonclassical Photon Pairs by a Medium with Coherent Atomic Memory. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.72.043806

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