We present a quantum-mechanical model that describes fiber-based frequency conversion by four-wave-mixing Bragg scattering in the presence of Raman interactions. In the case of continuous-wave pumps we find closed-form expressions for the conversion efficiency and photon statistics, characterized by the second-order correlation function. For pulsed pumps, we derive a highly general model based on Green functions, and provide a numerical solution method using a split-step scheme. In both cases, we find that noise from spontaneous Raman scattering can pose a serious challenge to this type of frequency conversion if the pumps are less than 30 THz from the quantum fields. However, this impact can be mitigated with crosspolarized pumps and on the anti-Stokes side, through cooling of the fiber.
We provide a comprehensive study of atomic Raman and Bragg diffraction when coupling to a pair of counterpropagating light gratings (double diffraction) or to a single one (single diffraction) and discuss the transition from one case to the other in a retroreflective geometry as the Doppler detuning changes. In contrast to single diffraction, double Raman loses its advantage of high diffraction efficiency for short pulses and has to be performed in a Bragg-type regime. Moreover, the structure of double diffraction leads to further limitations for broad momentum distributions on the efficiency …
We develop a systematic theory for optimising single-photon frequency conversion using optical Bragg scattering. The efficiency and phase-matching conditions for the desired Bragg scattering conversion as well as spurious scattering and modulation instability are identified. We find that third-order dispersion can suppress unwanted processes, while dispersion above the fourth order limits the maximum conversion efficiency. We apply the optimisation conditions to frequency conversion in highly nonlinear fiber, silicon nitride waveguides and silicon nanowires. Efficient conversion is confirmed u…
Low-noise, tunable wavelength-conversion through non-degenerate four-wave mixing Bragg scattering in SiNx waveguides is experimentally demonstrated. Finite element method simulations of waveguide dispersion are used with the split-step Fourier method to predict device performance, and indicate a strong dependence of the conversion efficiency on phase matching, which is controlled by the waveguide geometry. Two 1550 nm wavelength band pulsed pumps are used to achieve tunable conversion of a 980 nm signal over a range of 5 nm with a peak conversion efficiency of \approx 5 %. The demonstrated Bra…
We experimentally study Bragg-scattering four-wave mixing in a highly nonlinear fiber at telecom wavelengths using photon counters. We explore the polarization dependence of this process with a continuous wave signal in the macroscopic and attenuated regime, with a wavelength shift of 23 nm. Our measurements of mean photon numbers per second under various pump polarization configurations agree well with the theoretical and numerical predictions based on classical models. We discuss the impact of noise under these different polarization configurations.
Bragg diffraction of an atomic wave packet in a retroreflective geometry with two counterpropagating optical lattices exhibits a light shift induced phase. We show that the temporal shape of the light pulse determines the behavior of this phase shift: In contrast to Raman diffraction, Bragg diffraction with Gaussian pulses leads to a significant suppression of the intrinsic phase shift due to a scaling with the third power of the inverse Doppler frequency. However, for box-shaped laser pulses, the corresponding shift is twice as large as for Raman diffraction. Our results are based on approxim…
We present here a new type of cold atom interferometry gravimeter based on Bragg diffraction, which is able to increase the gravity measurement sensitivity and stability of common Raman atom gravimeters significantly. By comparing with Raman transition, the principles and advantages of Bragg diffraction-based atom gravimeters have been introduced. The theoretical model for a time-domain Bragg atom gravimeter with atomic incident direction parallels to the wave vector of Bragg lasers has been constructed. Some key technical requirements for an nth-order Bragg diffraction-based atom gravimeter h…
This work proposes and analyses a novel approach for the generation of separable (quantum uncorrelated) photon pairs based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion in Bragg reflection waveguides composed of semiconductor AlGaN layers. This platform allows the removal of any spectral correlation between paired photons that propagate in different spatial modes. The photons can be designed to show equal or different spectra by tuning the structural parameters and hence the dispersion of the waveguide.
In a retroreflective scheme atomic Raman diffraction adopts some of the properties of Bragg diffraction due to additional couplings to off-resonant momenta. As a consequence, double Raman diffraction has to be performed in a Bragg-type regime. Taking advantage of this regime, double Raman allows for resonant higher-order diffraction. We study theoretically the case of third-order diffraction and compare it to first order as well as a sequence of first-order pulses giving rise to the same momentum transfer as the third-order pulse. In fact, third-order diffraction constitutes a competitive tool…
The efficiency of the frequency conversion process at the heart of Raman heterodyne spectroscopy was improved by nearly four orders of magnitude by resonant enhancement of both the pump and signal optical fields. Our results using an erbium doped Y$_2$SiO$_5$ crystal at temperatures near 4K suggest that such an approach is promising for the quantum conversion of microwave to optical photons.
We experimentally demonstrate efficient Raman conversion to respective Stokes and anti-Stokes fields in both pulsed and continuous modes with a Rb-87 atomic vapor cell. The conversion efficiency is about 40-50% for the Stokes field and 20-30% for the anti-Stokes field, respectively. This conversion process is realized with feedback of both the Raman pump and the frequency-converted fields (Stokes or anti-Stokes). The experimental setup is very simple and can be applied easily to produce the light source with larger frequency difference using other Raman media. They may have wide applications i…
Coherent conversion between a Raman pump field and its Stokes field is observed in a Raman process with a strong atomic spin wave initially prepared by another Raman process operated in the stimulated emission regime. The oscillatory behavior resembles the Rabi oscillation in atomic population in a two-level atomic system driven by a strong light field. The Rabi-like oscillation frequency is found to be related to the strength of the pre-built atomic spin wave. High conversion efficiency of 40% from the Raman pump field to the Stokes field is recorded and it is independent of the input Raman p…
We have found a new hidden symmetry of time reversal light-atom interaction in the photon echo quantum memory with Raman atomic transition. The time-reversed quantum memory creates generalized conditions for ideal compression/decompression of time duration of the input light pulses and its wavelength. Based on a general analytical approach to this scheme, we have studied the optimal conditions for the light field compression/decompression in resonant atomic systems characterized by realistic spectral properties. The demonstrated necessary conditions for the effective quantum conversion of the …
Nonlinear frequency conversion is ubiquitous in laser engineering and quantum information technology. A long-standing goal in photonics is to integrate on-chip semiconductor laser sources with nonlinear optical components. Engineering waveguide lasers with spectra that phase-match to nonlinear processes on the same device is a formidable challenge. Here, we demonstrate difference-frequency generation in an AlGaAs Bragg reflection waveguide which incorporates the gain medium for the pump laser in its core. We include quantum dot layers in the AlGaAs waveguide that generate electrically driven l…
Robust stimulated Raman exact passages are requisite for controlling nonlinear quantum systems, with the wide applications ranging from ultracold molecules, non-linear optics to superchemistry. Inspired by shortcuts to adiabaticity, we propose the fast-forward scaling of stimulated Raman adiabatic processes with the nonlinearity involved, describing the transfer from an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate to a molecular one by controllable external fields. The fidelity and robustness of atom-molecule conversion are shown to surpass those of conventional adiabatic passages, assisted by fast-forward…
Microring resonators are attractive for low-power frequency conversion via Bragg-scattering four-wave-mixing due to their comb-like resonance spectrum. However, conversion efficiency is limited to 50% due to the equal probability of up- and down-conversion. Here, we demonstrate how two coupled microrings enable highly directional conversion between the spectral modes of one of the rings. An extinction between up- and down-conversion of more than 40 dB is experimentally observed. Based on this method, we propose a design for on-chip multiplexed single-photon sources that allow localized frequen…
Hyperfine atomic states are among the most promising candidates for qubit encoding in quantum information processing. In atomic systems, hyperfine transitions are typically driven through a two-photon Raman process by a laser field which is amplitude modulated at the hyperfine qubit frequency. Here, we introduce a new method for generating amplitude modulation by phase modulating a laser and reflecting it from a highly dispersive optical element known as a chirped Bragg grating (CBG). This approach is passively stable, offers high efficiency, and is compatible with high-power laser sources, en…
Low-noise frequency conversion of single photons is a critical tool in establishing fibre-based quantum networks. We show that a single photonic crystal fibre can achieve frequency conversion by Bragg-scattering four-wave mixing of source photons from an ultra-broad wavelength range by engineering a symmetric group velocity profile. Furthermore, we discuss how pump tuning can mitigate realistic discrepancies in device fabrication. This enables a single highly adaptable frequency conversion interface to link disparate nodes in a quantum network via the telecoms band.
We report a resource-efficient scheme in which a single pump laser was used to achieve frequency conversion by Bragg-scattering four-wave mixing in a photonic crystal fiber. We demonstrate bidirectional conversion of coherent light between Sr+ P1/2 - D3/2 emission wavelength at 1092 nm and the telecommunication C band with conversion efficiencies of 4.2 % and 37 % for up- and down-conversion, respectively. We discuss how the scheme may be viably scaled to meet the temporal, spectral and polarisation stability requirements of a hybrid light-matter quantum network.
State-preserving frequency conversion in the optical domain is a necessary component in many configurations of quantum information processing and communication. Thus far, nonlinear crystals are used for this purpose. Here, we report on a new approach based on coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) in a dense molecular hydrogen gas. This four-wave mixing process sidesteps the limitations imposed by crystal properties, it is intrinsically broadband and does not generate an undesired background. We demonstrate this method by converting photons from 434 nm to 370 nm and show that their polar…
We consider a quantum memory scheme based on the conversion of a signal pulse into a long-lived spin coherence via stimulated off-resonant Raman process. For a storing medium consisting of alkali atoms, we have calculated the Autler-Townes resonance structure created by a strong control field. By taking into account the upper hyperfine states of the D1 optical transition, we show important deviations from the predictions of the usual three-level Lambda-scheme approximation and we demonstrate an enhancement of the process for particular detunings of the control. We estimate the memory efficienc…
We report on measurements of splitting Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) by using a time-dependent optical lattice potential. First, we demonstrate the division of a BEC into a set of equally populated components by means of time dependent control of Landau-Zener tunneling in a vertical lattice potential. Next, we apply time dependent optical Bragg mirrors to a BEC oscillating in a harmonic trap. We demonstrate high-order Bragg reflection of the condensate due to multi-photon Raman transitions, where the depth of the optical lattice potential allows for a choice of the order of the transition. F…
The future of quantum communication systems and quantum networks heavily rely on the ability to fabricate and coherently control the conversion of photons between different modes based on a solid-state plateform. In this work, we propose and theoretically investigate a scheme to optomechanically control coherent mode conversion of optical photons by utilizing two optically coupled hybrid semiconductor microcavities containing a quantum dot (QD). One of the microcavity is pumped by an external laser and the second cavity is driven by light emitted by the QD that is embedded in the interface sep…
We demonstrate a photon-counting optical time-domain reflectometry with 42.19 dB dynamic range using an ultra-low noise up-conversion single photon detector. By employing the long wave pump technique and a volume Bragg grating, we reduce the noise of our up-conversion single photon detector, and achieve a noise equivalent power of -139.7 dBm/sqrt(Hz). We perform the OTDR experiments using a fiber of length 216.95 km, and show that our system can identify defects along the entire fiber length with a distance resolution better than 10 cm in a measurement time of 13 minutes.
We describe a chip-scale, telecommunications-band frequency conversion interface designed for low-noise operation at wavelengths desirable for common single photon emitters. Four-wave mixing Bragg scattering in silicon nitride waveguides is used to demonstrate frequency upconversion and downconversion between the 980 nm and 1550 nm wavelength regions, with signal-to-background levels >10 and conversion efficiency of approximately -60 dB at low continuous wave input pump powers (<50 mW). Finite element simulations and the split-step Fourier method indicate that increased input powers of approxi…
Optical frequency conversion has applications ranging from tunable light sources to telecommunications-band interfaces for quantum information science. Here, we demonstrate efficient, low-noise frequency conversion on a nanophotonic chip through four-wave-mixing Bragg scattering in compact (footprint < 0.5 x 10^-4 cm^2) Si3N4 microring resonators. We investigate three frequency conversion configurations: (1) spectral translation over a few nanometers within the 980 nm band, (2) upconversion from 1550 nm to 980 nm, and (3) downconversion from 980 nm to 1550 nm. With conversion efficiencies rang…
The paper studies the Raman quantum memory protocol as applied to quantum light with orbital angular momentum. The memory protocol is implemented on an ensemble of three-level cold atoms with the $Λ$- configuration of energy levels. The possibility of storing quantum statistics of light with an orbital momentum is analysed in the case when the driving field could be treated as a plane wave. The efficiency analysis shows that examined storage/retrieval processes do not cause the efficiency decreasing compared with the spatial multimode memory protocol considered in [Golubeva et al. 2012]]. We a…
High-gain resonant nonlinear Raman scattering on trapped cold atoms within a high-fineness ring optical cavity is simply explained under a nonlinear opto-mechanical mechanism, and a proposal using it to detect frequency of micro-trap on atom chip is presented. The enhancement of scattering spectrum is due to a coherent Raman conversion between two different cavity modes mediated by collective vibrations of atoms through nonlinear opto-mechanical couplings. The physical conditions of this technique are roughly estimated on Rubidium atoms, and a simple quantum analysis as well as a multi-body se…
The ability to convert quantum states from microwave photons to optical photons is important for hybrid system approaches to quantum information processing. In this paper we report the up-conversion of a microwave signal into the optical telecommunications wavelength band using erbium dopants in a yttrium orthosilicate crystal via stimulated Raman scattering. The microwaves were applied to the sample using a 3D copper loop-gap resonator and the coupling and signal optical fields were single passed. The conversion efficiency was low, in agreement with a theoretical analysis, but can be signific…
We demonstrate background-free quantum frequency conversion of single photons from an epitaxially-grown InAs quantum dot. Single photons at \approx 980 nm are combined with a pump laser near 1550 nm inside a periodically-poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide, generating single photons at \approx 600 nm. The large red-detuning between the pump and signal wavelengths ensures nearly background-free conversion, avoiding processes such as upconversion of anti-Stokes Raman scattered pump photons in the PPLN crystal. Second-order correlation measurements on the single photon stream are performed bot…
We study quantum frequency translation and two-color photon interference enabled by the Bragg scattering four-wave mixing process in optical fiber. Using realistic model parameters, we computationally and analytically determine the Green function and Schmidt modes for cases with various pump-pulse lengths. These cases can be categorized as either "non-discriminatory" or "discriminatory" in regards to their propensity to exhibit high-efficiency translation or high-visibility two-photon interference for many different shapes of input wave packets or for only a few input wave packets, respectivel…
By driving a dispersively coupled qubit-resonator system, we realize an "impedance-matched" $Λ$ system that has two identical radiative decay rates from the top level and interacts with a semi-infinite waveguide. It has been predicted that a photon input from the waveguide deterministically induces a Raman transition in the system and switches its electronic state. We confirm this through microwave response to a continuous probe field, observing near-perfect ($99.7\%$) extinction of the reflection and highly efficient ($74\%$) frequency down-conversion. These proof-of-principle results lead to…
A compact setup for two-way single-photon-level frequency conversion between 852 nm and 1560 nm has been implemented with the same periodically-poled magnesium-oxide-doped lithium niobate (PPMgO:LN) bulk crystals for connecting cesium D2 line (852 nm) to telecom C-band. By single-pass mixing a strong continuous-wave pump laser at 1878 nm and the single-photon-level periodical signal pulses in a 50-mm-long PPMgO:LN bulk crystal, the conversion efficiency of ~1.7% ( ~1.9%) for 852-nm to 1560-nm down-conversion (1560-nm to 852-nm up-conversion) have been achieved. We analyzed noise photons induce…
