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Quantum Optics Leture at the Optics and Photonics Winter School

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Quantum Optics Leture at the Optics and Photonics Winter School Quantum Optics Leture at the Optics and Photonics Winter School Poul Jessen Galina Khitrova Miroslav Kolesik Brian Anderson Masud Mansuripur Rolf Binder Jerome Moloney Jason Jones Ewan Wright What is Quantum Optics? – Not classical optics, but something more and different – Science of non-classical light – Any science combining light and quantum mechanics What is Light? – Electromagnetic waves? – Photons? Dancing with Photons by Donald Farland — Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists 10/15/14 5:54 PM register tour sign in Title / Author / ISBN What is Quantum Optics? Home My Books Friends Recommendations Explore Genres Listopia Giveaways Popular Goodreads Voice Ebooks Fun Trivia Quizzes Quotes Community Groups Creative Writing People Events Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Start by marking “Dancing with Photons” as Want to Read: Want to Read saving… Want to Read Currently Reading Read http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22737053-dancing-with-photons Page 1 of 6 Not so fast! Appl. Phys. B 60, 77-84 (1995) Applied Physics B and Optics © Springer-Verlag 1995 Not so fast! Anti-photon W.E. Lamb, Jr. Optical Sciences Center, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA Received: 23 July 1994/Accepted: 18 September 1994 Abstract. It should be apparent from the title of this afterward, there was a population explosion of people article that the author does not like the use of the word engaged in fundamental research and in very useful tech- "photon", which dates from 1926. In his view, there is no nical and commercial developments of lasers. QTR was such thing as a photon. Only a comedy of errors and available, but not in a form convenient for the problems at historical accidents led to its popularity among physicists hand. The photon concepts as used by a high percentage and optical scientists. I admit that the word is short and of the laser community have no scientific justification. It is convenient. Its use is also habit forming. Similarly, one now about thirty-five years after the making of the first might find it convenient to speak of the "aether" or "vac- laser. The sooner an appropriate reformulation of our uum" to stand for empty space, even if no such thing educational processes can be made, the better. existed. There are very good substitute words for "photon", (e.g., "radiation" or "light"), and for "photo- nics" (e.g., "optics" or "quantum optics"). Similar objec- 1 A short history of pre-photonic radiation tions are possible to use of the word "phonon", which dates from 1932. Objects like electrons, neutrinos of finite Modern optical theory [2] began with the works of Ch. rest mass, or helium atoms can, under suitable conditions, Huyghens and I. Newton near the end of the seventeenth be considered to be particles, since their theories then have century. Huyghen's treatise on wave optics was published viable non-relativistic and non-quantum limits. This pa- in 1690. Newton's "Optiks', which appeared in 1704, dealt per outlines the main features of the quantum theory of with his corpuscular theory of light. radiation and indicates how they can be used to treat A decisive work in 1801 by T. Young, on the two-slit problems in quantum optics. diffraction pattern, showed that the wave version of optics was much to be preferred over the corpuscular form. PACS: 12.20.-m; 42.50.-p However, so high was the prestige of I. Newton, that the teaching of optical physics at Cambridge University only changed from corpuscular to wave optics in 1845. There were also the discoveries by A.-M. Amp6re (1820, 1825), H. Oersted (1820) and M. Faraday (1831) of electromagnetic phenomena in the first half of the nine- The underlying science of light is called the Quantum teenth century, which culminated in the publication of the Theory of Radiation (QTR), or Quantum Elec- treatise on electromagnetic theory in 1864 by J. C. Max- troDynamics (QED). There were hints of this subject in well. With the discovery of electromagnetic waves by H. W. Heisenberg's first papers on matrix mechanics of 1925, Hertz in 1887, there could be little doubt that light had but the real foundation came in P. Dirac's work of 1927. a wave rather than a corpuscular nature. At first, only a few people needed to know much about the By the time of his inaugural lecture [3] as Cavendish quantum theory of radiation. With the conception, in Professor at Cambridge University in 1871, J. C. Maxwell 1951, of the ammonia-beam maser by C. Townes, the had recognized that matter had to have an atomic struc- making of the ruby optical maser by Th. Maiman and the ture. He foresaw that integral numbers and probability helium-neon gas laser by A. Javan, W. Bennett and theory would play a role in the new physics. Unfortunate- D. Herriott in 1960, and a flood of other devices soon ly, Maxwell died in 1879, at the age of 48! During the last decade of the nineteenth century, a number of new and It is a pleasure to join in the 60th birthday celebration of the very unexpected things were discovered: electrons, posi- Director, Herbert Walther, of the Max-Planck-Institute for Quan- tive ions, X-rays, radioactivity and the photoelectric effect. tum Optics at Garching, and wish him much happiness and many A theory of matter could be based on the atom model more years of his very great scientific creativity of J. J. Thomson (1904), in which electrons moved in With all due resepect to W. Lamb, let us try again What is light? – a wave? – a stream of particles (photons)? Take the question seriously – test each hypothesis through experimentation! Key signature of wave behavior? – Interference! Double-slit experiment Single-slit diffraction Double-slit diffraction Key signature of particle behavior? Einstein: photo-electric effect Electrons are released only for light with a frequency w! such that h ! is greater than the work function of the metal in question But the quantum theory of electron excitation can explain this based on classical electromagnetic fields, so the photo-electric effect only confirms that electrons are particles. BS single photon Indivisibility input A particle incident on a barrier is either transmitted or or reflected. single photon input Wave behavior prob. of detection PD1 PD2 M BS PD1 ! BS single photon PD2 input M phase shifter ! Particle behavior prob. of detection PD1 PD2 M PD1 ! PD2 BS single photon input M phase shifter ! – Evidently a single photon can behave like a wave or a particle, depending on the experiment we do. This is what we know as wave-particle duality. – Does the photon “know” when it hits the first BS if we are doing a wave or particle experiment and then behaves accordingly? – Wigner’s gedanken experiment: Delayed Choice! Decide at random whether to put in the second BS only after the photon has passed the first BS Wave behavior Particle behavior PD1 PD1 PD2 PD2 M BS M ! ! BS BS single single photon photon input M input M phase shifter phase shifter Wigners experiment was done in 2008 PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS week ending PRL 100, 220402 (2008) 6 JUNE 2008 Delayed-Choice Test of Quantum Complementarity with Interfering Single Photons Vincent Jacques,1 E Wu,1,2 Fre´de´ric Grosshans,1 Franc¸ois Treussart,1 Philippe Grangier,3 Alain Aspect,3 and Jean-Franc¸ois Roch1,* 1Laboratoire de Photonique Quantique et Mole´culaire, Ecole Normale Supe´rieure de Cachan, UMR CNRS 8537, Cachan, France 2State Key Laboratory of Precision Spectroscopy, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China 3Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l’Institut d’Optique, UMR CNRS 8501, Palaiseau, France (Received 12 February 2008; published 3 June 2008) We report an experimental test of quantum complementarity with single-photon pulses sent into a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with an output beam splitter of adjustable reflection coefficient R. In addition, the experiment is realized in Wheeler’s delayed-choice regime. Each randomly set value of R allows us to observe interference with visibility V and to obtain incomplete which-path information characterized by the distinguishability parameter D. Measured values of V and D are found to fulfill the complementarity relation V2 D2 1. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.220402 PACS numbers: 03.65.Ta, 42.50.Ar, 42.50.Xa As emphasized by Bohr [1], complementarity lies at the anced interferometer as used in some neutron interferom- heart of quantum mechanics. A celebrated example is the etry experiments, one has partial WPI while keeping illustration of wave-particle duality by considering single interference with limited visibility [24]. The complemen- particles in a two-path interferometer [2], where one choo- tary quantities—WPI and interference visibility—could ses either to observe interference fringes, associated to a then be partially determined simultaneously. wavelike behavior, or to know which path of the inter- Consistent theoretical analysis of both schemes, inde- ferometer has been followed, according to a particlelike pendently published by Jaeger et al. [25] and by Englert behavior [3]. Although interference has been observed at [26] leads to the inequality [27] the individual particle level with electrons [4], neutrons 2 2 [5], atoms [6,7], molecules [8], only a few experiments V D 1 (1) with massive particles have explicitly checked the mutual exclusiveness of which-path information (WPI) and inter- which puts an upper bound to the maximum values of ference [9–13]. simultaneously determined interference visibility V and In the case of photons, it has been pinpointed that mean- path distinguishability D, a parameter that quantifies the ingful two-path interference experiments demand a single- available WPI on the quantum system.
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