Research team led by Academician GUO Guangcan from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) achieved single-photon isolation and coherent light isolation at room temperature. This result was published on Science Advance.
The team transmitted signals in two opposite directions to the nonreciprocal system to explain the single-photon and classical optical nonreciprocity (ONR) for regimes of the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) and Raman, respectively, and experimentally realized single-photon (ONR) and coherent light isolation.
The isolation of ONR reached 22.52 ± 0.10 dB, and the insertion loss was about 1.95 dB for a genuine single photon, with bandwidth up to hundreds of megahertz. Furthermore, the team also achieved ONR of multi-band multiplexing, and thus expanding the range of signal frequency bands that can achieve nonreciprocity.
The results of this research have potential applications in practically integration of classical and quantum information processing.
Schematic diagram of optical nonreciprocity induced by atomic thermal motion and diagram of experimental apparatus (Image by DONG Mingxin et al. )
Results of single photon nonreciprocity experiments (Image by DONG Mingxin et al. )
DONG Mingxin, a postdoctoral fellow at the CAS Key Laboratory of Quantum Information, USTC is the first author. The corresponding authors are Prof. SHI Baosen, Prof. DING Dongsheng from USTC and Prof. XIA Keyu from Nanjing University (NJU).
Paper link:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/12/eabe8924.full
(Written by ZHANG Boxian, edited by JIANG Pengcen, USTC News Center)
