Resonantly driven coherent oscillations in a solid-state quantum emitter

    Authors

    E. B. Flagg; A. Muller; J. W. Robertson; S. Founta; D. G. Deppe; M. Xiao; W. Ma; G. J. Salamo;C. K. Shih

    Comments

    Authors: contact us about adding a copy of your work at STARS@ucf.edu

    Abstract

    Single-quantum emitters emit only one photon at a time(1,2), but the properties of the photon depend on how the emitter is excited(3). Incoherent excitation is simple and broadly used with solid-state emitters such as quantum dots, but does not allow direct manipulation of the quantum state. Coherent, resonant excitation on the other hand is used in pump-probe techniques to examine the quantum state of the emitter(4), but does not permit collection of the single-photon emission. Coherent control with simultaneous generation of photons has been an elusive goal in solid-state approaches, where, because of strong laser scattering at the detection wavelength, measurement of resonant emission has been limited to cross-polarized detection(5) or Stokes-shift techniques(6,7). Here we demonstrate that a semiconductor quantum dot in a microcavity can be resonantly driven and its single-photon emission extracted background free. Under strong continuous-wave excitation, the dot undergoes several Rabi oscillations before emitting, which are visible as oscillations in the second-order correlation function. The quantum-dot states are therefore 'dressed', resulting in a Mollow-triplet emission spectrum. Such coherent control will be necessary for future high-efficiency sources of indistinguishable single photons(3,8), which can be used for quantum key distribution(9) or through post-selection(10) to generate entangled photon pairs(11,12).

    Journal Title

    Nature Physics

    Volume

    5

    Issue/Number

    3

    Publication Date

    1-1-2009

    Document Type

    Article

    First Page

    203

    Last Page

    207

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000264446600015

    ISSN

    1745-2473

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