Browsing by Author "Wen, Rong"

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    Non-Hermitian Magnon-Photon Interference in an Atomic Ensemble
    (APS, 2019-06) Wen, Rong; Zou, Chang-Ling; Zhu, Xinyu; Chen, Peng; Ou, Z. Y.; Chen, J. F.; Zhang, Weiping; Physics, School of Science
    The interference of photons in a lossy beam splitter (BS) exhibits anticoalescence, which is surprising for bosons. Such a non-Hermitian system involving open quantum dynamics is of particular interest for quantum information processing and metrology. The Hermiticity of photonic devices is generally fixed according to the material, but is controllable at the interface of photons and atomic systems. Here, we demonstrate a tunable non-Hermitian BS for the interference between traveling photonic and localized magnonic modes. The crossover from a Hermitian to a non-Hermitian magnon-photon BS is achieved by controlling the coherent and incoherent interaction mediated by the excited levels of atoms, which is reconfigurable via the detuning of a control laser. A correlated interference pattern between the photons and magnons is demonstrated by such a non-Hermitian BS. Our system has the potential to operate with photons and magnons at the single-quanta level, and it provides a versatile quantum interface for studying the non-Hermitian quantum physics and parity-time symmetry.
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    Temporal Purity and Quantum Interference of Single Photons from Two Independent Cold Atomic Ensembles
    (APS, 2016-07) Qian, Peng; Gu, Zhenjie; Cao, Rong; Wen, Rong; Ou, Z. Y.; Chen, J. F.; Zhang, Weiping; Department of Physics, School of Science
    The temporal purity of single photons is crucial to the indistinguishability of independent photon sources for the fundamental study of the quantum nature of light and the development of photonic technologies. Currently, the technique for single photons heralded from time-frequency entangled biphotons created in nonlinear crystals does not guarantee the temporal-quantum purity, except using spectral filtering. Nevertheless, an entirely different situation is anticipated for narrow-band biphotons with a coherence time far longer than the time resolution of a single-photon detector. Here we demonstrate temporally pure single photons with a coherence time of 100 ns, directly heralded from the time-frequency entangled biphotons generated by spontaneous four-wave mixing in cold atomic ensembles, without any supplemented filters or cavities. A near-perfect purity and indistinguishability are both verified through Hong-Ou-Mandel quantum interference using single photons from two independent cold atomic ensembles. The time-frequency entanglement provides a route to manipulate the pure temporal state of the single-photon source.