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Deterministic freely propagating photonic qubits with negative Wigner functions

Nature Photonics volume 17, pages 688–693 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Engineering the quantum states of freely propagating light is of paramount importance for quantum technologies. As yet, the experimental generation of photonic states with negative Wigner functions has relied intrinsically on probabilistic schemes, heralded by the projection of a quantum measurement. Here we describe the fully deterministic preparation of freely propagating quantum states of light with negative Wigner functions, obtained by mapping the internal state of an intracavity Rydberg superatom onto an optical qubit encoded as a superposition of 0 and 1 photons. This approach enables us to reach a 60% photon generation efficiency in a well-controlled spatiotemporal mode while maintaining strong photon antibunching. By changing the qubit rotation angle, we observe an evolution from quadrature squeezing to Wigner negativity. Our experiment demonstrates this new technique as a viable method for deterministically generating non-Gaussian photonic resources, lifting several major roadblocks in optical quantum engineering.

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Fig. 1: Deterministic generation of number-encoded photonic qubits with an intracavity Rydberg superatom.
Fig. 2: High-efficiency single-photon generation.
Fig. 3: Homodyne tomography of photon-number-encoded photonic qubits \(\left\vert {\psi }_{\theta }\right\rangle\), sorted columnwise by increasing qubit rotation angle θ.
Fig. 4: Statistics of field quadratures.

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Data availability

The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the ERC Starting Grant 677470 SEAQUEL and the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars program. We thank P. Travers for technical support, and S. Ćuk and M. Enault-Dautheribes for their assistance at the early stage of the project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. JEIP, UAR 3573 CNRS, Collège de France, PSL University, Paris, France

    Valentin Magro, Julien Vaneecloo, Sébastien Garcia & Alexei Ourjoumtsev

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  1. Valentin Magro
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  2. Julien Vaneecloo
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  3. Sébastien Garcia
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  4. Alexei Ourjoumtsev
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Contributions

J.V., S.G. and A.O. built the experimental setup. V.M. and S.G. carried out the measurements. V.M., J.V. and S.G. performed the data analysis. A.O. developed the theory and numerical simulations. S.G. and A.O. wrote the paper with input from all authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexei Ourjoumtsev.

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Nature Photonics thanks Adam Miranowicz and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–4 and Discussion.

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Magro, V., Vaneecloo, J., Garcia, S. et al. Deterministic freely propagating photonic qubits with negative Wigner functions. Nat. Photon. 17, 688–693 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01196-y

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