%0 Journal Article %J Phys. Rev. Lett., in press %D 2021 %T Tunable three-body loss in a nonlinear Rydberg medium %A Dalia P. Ornelas Huerta %A Przemyslaw Bienias %A Alexander N. Craddock %A Michael Gullans %A Andrew J. Hachtel %A Marcin Kalinowski %A Mary E. Lyon %A Alexey V. Gorshkov %A Steven L. Rolston %A J. V. Porto %X

Long-range Rydberg interactions, in combination with electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), give rise to strongly interacting photons where the strength, sign, and form of the interactions are widely tunable and controllable. Such control can be applied to both coherent and dissipative interactions, which provides the potential to generate novel few-photon states. Recently it has been shown that Rydberg-EIT is a rare system in which three-body interactions can be as strong or stronger than two-body interactions. In this work, we study a three-body scattering loss for Rydberg-EIT in a wide regime of single and two-photon detunings. Our numerical simulations of the full three-body wavefunction and analytical estimates based on Fermi's Golden Rule strongly suggest that the observed features in the outgoing photonic correlations are caused by the resonant enhancement of the three-body losses.

%B Phys. Rev. Lett., in press %8 9/28/2020 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13599 %0 Journal Article %D 2020 %T On-demand indistinguishable single photons from an efficient and pure source based on a Rydberg ensemble %A Dalia P. Ornelas-Huerta %A Alexander N. Craddock %A Elizabeth A. Goldschmidt %A Andrew J. Hachtel %A Yidan Wang %A P. Bienias %A Alexey V. Gorshkov %A Steve L. Rolston %A James V. Porto %X

Single photons coupled to atomic systems have shown to be a promising platform for developing quantum technologies. Yet a bright on-demand, highly pure and highly indistinguishable single-photon source compatible with atomic platforms is lacking. In this work, we demonstrate such a source based on a strongly interacting Rydberg system. The large optical nonlinearities in a blockaded Rydberg ensemble convert coherent light into a single-collective excitation that can be coherently retrieved as a quantum field. We observe a single-transverse-mode efficiency up to 0.18(2), g(2)=2.0(1.5)×10−4, and indistinguishability of 0.982(7), making this system promising for scalable quantum information applications. Accounting for losses, we infer a generation probability up to 0.40(4). Furthermore, we investigate the effects of contaminant Rydberg excitations on the source efficiency. Finally, we introduce metrics to benchmark the performance of on-demand single-photon sources. 

%8 3/4/2020 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.02202