LÖFFLER LAB

Light consists of single photons, and the most classical type of light, coherent laser light, actually consists of a large mix of so-called photon number states - packets containing a certain number of photons. This fact makes it very hard to transform laser light into single photons, which are an important resource for photonic quantum information from quantum key distribution to quantum computing. High-quality sources of single photons were only recently demonstrated by several groups including us. In this paper in PRL, we demonstrate that we can turn it around: based on such a high-quality source of single photons, and quantum interference in an optical setup, we are able to engineer artificial states of light that are very similar to coherent laser light, literally, we are making "light from scratch"! There are subtle differences between textbook coherent states and our artificial coherent states, for instance, our artificial light contains some quantum entanglement between photons..

Primary location: Leiden Netherlands