Squeezed light from single atoms

Squeezed light from single atoms

  9:11:00 PM    Science Lover

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Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics scientists generate amplitude-squeezed light fields using single atoms trapped inside optical cavities.

A single rubidium atom in a cavity squeezes the quantum
fluctuations of a weak laser beam, decreasing the fluctuations
of the amplitude at the expense of the phase.
The effect is exaggerated for clarity.

In classical optics light is usually described as a wave, but at the most fundamental quantum level this wave consists of discrete particles called photons. Over the time, physicists developed many tools to manipulate both the wave-like and the particle-like quantum properties of the light. For instance, they created single photon sources with single atoms, using their ability to absorb and emit photons one by one. A team around Professor Gerhard Rempe, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching near Munich) and head of the Quantum Dynamics Division, has now observed that the light emitted by a single atom may exhibit much richer dynamics (Nature 474, 623, June 30, 2011). Strongly interacting with light inside a cavity, the atom modifies the wave-like properties of the light field, reducing its amplitude or phase fluctuations below the level allowed for classical electromagnetic radiation. This is the very first observation of “squeezed” light produced by a single atom.

The “graininess” of the photons in a light wave causes small fluctuations of the wave’s amplitude and phase. For classical beams, the minimal amount of amplitude and phase fluctuations is equal. However, by creating interactions between the photons, one can “squeeze” the fluctuations of the amplitude below this so-called “shot noise” level at the expense of increasing the fluctuations of the phase, and vice-versa. Unfortunately, the photonic interactions inside standard optical media are very weak, and require bright light beams to be observed. Single atoms are promising candidates to enable such interactions at a few-photon level. Their ability to generate squeezed light has been predicted 30 years ago, but the amount of light they emit is very tiny and so far all attempts to set this idea into realization have failed. In the Quantum Dynamics Division at MPQ sophisticated methods for cooling, isolating and manipulating single atoms have been developed over many years, and made this observation possible.



A single rubidium atom is trapped inside a cavity made of two very reflective mirrors in a distance of about a tenth of a millimetre from each other. When weak laser light is injected into this cavity, the atom can interact with one photon many times, and forms a kind of artificial molecule with the photons of the light field. As a consequence, two photons can enter the system at the same time and become correlated. “According to the model of Bohr, a single atom emits exactly one single energy quantum, i.e., one photon. That means that the number of photons is exactly known, but the phase of the light is not defined”, Professor Gerhard Rempe explains. “But the two photons that are emitted by this strongly coupled atom are indistinguishable and oscillate together. Therefore this time the wave-like properties of the propagating light field are modified.”

When the physicists use a laser beam which is resonant with the excitation frequency of the atom, the measurements show a suppression of the phase fluctuations. If the laser light is resonant with the cavity, they observe a squeezing of the amplitude instead.

The latter situation is illustrated in the figure: The atom in the cavity turns a laser beam into light which has less amplitude and more phase fluctuations than the shot-noise limit. “Our experiment shows that the light emitted by single atoms is much more complex than in the simple view of Albert Einstein concerning photo-emission”, Dr. Karim Murr emphasizes. “The squeezing that we observe is due to the coherent interaction between the two photons emitted from the system. Our measurement is in excellent agreement with the predictions of quantum electrodynamics in the strong-coupling regime.” And Dr. Alexei Ourjoumtsev, who has been working on the experiment as a post doc, adds: “Usually single quantum objects are used to manipulate the particle-like properties of light. It is interesting to see that they can also modify its wave-like properties, and create observable squeezing with excitations beams containing only two photons on average”.

So far squeezed light has only been generated with systems containing many atoms, such as crystals, using very high intensity beams, i.e. many photons. For the first time now physicists have succeeded in generating this kind of non-classical radiation with single atoms and extremely weak light fields. The ability of a single atom to induce strong coherent interactions between propagating photons opens up new perspectives for photonic quantum logic with single emitters.

More information: A. Ourjoumtsev, A. Kubanek, M. Koch, C. Sames, P. W. H. Pinkse, G. Rempe, & K. Murr

Observation of squeezed light from one atom excited with two photons , Nature 474, 623, 30 June 2011. Provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

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Turning Waste Heat Into Power

Turning Waste Heat Into Power

  2:06:00 AM    Science Lover

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What do a car engine, a power plant, a factory and a solar panel have in common? They all generate heat -- a lot of which is wasted.

A "forest" of molecules holds the promise of turning waste heat into electricity. UA physicists discovered that because of quantum effects, electron waves traveling along the backbone of each molecule interfere with each other, leading to the buildup of a voltage between the hot and cold electrodes (the golden structures on the bottom and top). (Credit: Justin Bergfield, University of Arizona)

University of Arizona physicists have discovered a new way of harvesting waste heat and turning it into electrical power.

Using a theoretical model of a so-called molecular thermoelectric device, the technology holds great promise for making cars, power plants, factories and solar panels more efficient, to name a few possible applications. In addition, more efficient thermoelectric materials would make ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, obsolete.

The research group led by Charles Stafford, associate professor of physics, published its findings in the September issue of the scientific journal, ACS Nano.

"Thermoelectricity makes it possible to cleanly convert heat directly into electrical energy in a device with no moving parts," said lead author Justin Bergfield, a doctoral candidate in the UA College of Optical Sciences.

"Our colleagues in the field tell us they are pretty confident that the devices we have designed on the computer can be built with the characteristics that we see in our simulations."

"We anticipate the thermoelectric voltage using our design to be about 100 times larger than what others have achieved in the lab," Stafford added.

Catching the energy lost through waste heat has been on the wish list of engineers for a long time but, so far, a concept for replacing existing devices that is both more efficient and economically competitive has been lacking.

Unlike existing heat-conversion devices such as refrigerators and steam turbines, the devices of Bergfield and Stafford require no mechanics and no ozone-depleting chemicals. Instead, a rubber-like polymer sandwiched between two metals acting as electrodes can do the trick.

Car or factory exhaust pipes could be coated with the material, less than 1 millionth of an inch thick, to harvest energy otherwise lost as heat and generate electricity.

The physicists take advantage of the laws of quantum physics, a realm not typically tapped into when engineering power-generating technology. To the uninitiated, the laws of quantum physics appear to fly in the face of how things are "supposed" to behave.

The key to the technology lies in a quantum law physicists call wave-particle duality: Tiny objects such as electrons can behave either as a wave or as a particle.

"In a sense, an electron is like a red sports car," Bergfield said. "The sports car is both a car and it's red, just as the electron is both a particle and a wave. The two are properties of the same thing. Electrons are just less obvious to us than sports cars."

Bergfield and Stafford discovered the potential for converting heat into electricity when they studied polyphenyl ethers, molecules that spontaneously aggregate into polymers, long chains of repeating units. The backbone of each polyphenyl ether molecule consists of a chain of benzene rings, which in turn are built from carbon atoms. The chain link structure of each molecule acts as a "molecular wire" through which electrons can travel.

"We had both worked with these molecules before and thought about using them for a thermoelectric device," Bergfield said, "but we hadn't really found anything special about them until Michelle Solis, an undergrad who worked on independent study in the lab, discovered that, low and behold, these things had a special feature."

Using computer simulations, Bergfield then "grew" a forest of molecules sandwiched between two electrodes and exposed the array to a simulated heat source.

"As you increase the number of benzene rings in each molecule, you increase the power generated," Bergfield said.

The secret to the molecules' capability to turn heat into power lies in their structure: Like water reaching a fork in a river, the flow of electrons along the molecule is split in two once it encounters a benzene ring, with one flow of electrons following along each arm of the ring.

Bergfield designed the benzene ring circuit in such a way that in one path the electron is forced to travel a longer distance around the ring than the other. This causes the two electron waves to be out of phase once they reunite upon reaching the far side of the benzene ring. When the waves meet, they cancel each other out in a process known as quantum interference. When a temperature difference is placed across the circuit, this interruption in the flow of electric charge leads to the buildup of an electric potential -- voltage -- between the two electrodes.

Wave interference is a concept exploited by noise-cancelling headphones: Incoming sound waves are met with counter waves generated by the device, wiping out the offending noise.

"We are the first to harness the wave nature of the electron and develop a concept to turn it into usable energy," Stafford said.

Analogous to solid state versus spinning hard drive type computer memory, the UA-designed thermoelectric devices require no moving parts. By design, they are self-contained, easier to manufacture and easier to maintain compared to currently available technology.

"You could just take a pair of metal electrodes and paint them with a single layer of these molecules," Bergfield said. "That would give you a little sandwich that would act as your thermoelectric device. With a solid-state device you don't need cooling agents, you don't need liquid nitrogen shipments, and you don't need to do a lot of maintenance."

"You could say, instead of Freon gas, we use electron gas," Stafford added.

"The effects we see are not unique to the molecules we used in our simulation," Bergfield said. "Any quantum-scale device where you have a cancellation of electric charge will do the trick, as long as there is a temperature difference. The greater the temperature difference, the more power you can generate."

Molecular thermoelectric devices could help solve an issue currently plaguing photovoltaic cells harvesting energy from sunlight.

"Solar panels get very hot and their efficiency goes down," Stafford said. "You could harvest some of that heat and use it to generate additional electricity while simultaneously cooling the panel and making its own photovoltaic process more efficient."

"With a very efficient thermoelectric device based on our design, you could power about 200 100-Watt light bulbs using the waste heat of an automobile," he said. "Put another way, one could increase the car's efficiency by well over 25 percent, which would be ideal for a hybrid since it already uses an electrical motor."

So, next time you watch a red sports car zip by, think of the hidden power of the electron and how much more efficient that sports car could be with a thermoelectric device wrapped around its exhaust pipe.

Funding for this research was provided by the University of Arizona physics department.

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