Abstract

Single photons are ideal information carriers, but their limited interaction among themselves and with the surrounding environment poses a major challenge for developing a completely optical quantum processor. One possible solution lies in hybrid photon-atom approaches, but common sense suggests that an efficient coupling can be achieved only with correspondingly narrowband resonant single photons, and that ultrashort single photons with bandwidths in the THz range would be useless for this purpose given their very weak interaction with atoms. In recent experiments, we have shown that, against common intuition, a single photon of extremely short duration, and thus possessing a wide range of different colors, can still strongly interact with very monochromatic atoms.

© 2016 Optical Society of America