I’m not sure about Arlo Guthrie.
Do you have something you’d like to share? A link? A joke? Some words of wisdom? A topic to discuss? It’s our nightly Open Thread, and you have the floor.
Archive of entries posted on 15th October 2020
Hooray! More Photon Squeezing! Unfortunately, the Chinese Are The Ones Doing It
We’ve already discussed photon squeezing, as I’m sure you’ll remember, but:
Toward a Perfect Single-Photon Source
October 7, 2020 | Physics 13, s127 |Rachel BerkowitzSemiconductor quantum dot emits photons that are squeezed below the fundamental noise limit
Huh.
In the classical world, it was thought to be straightforward to generate a well-defined amount of radiation in a given time period.
Yes, we all assumed that. Naturally!
But at the quantum scale, inherent uncertainty in a photon’s energy and phase reduces that precision and results in a blurred photon count.
Uh….
To solve this problem, Wang and his colleagues designed a photon source that could eliminate the blurring.
Right-o!
The researchers coupled a semiconductor quantum dot to the center of a
2-μm-diameter cavity using tiny micropillars. When excited by a laser, the quantum dot emitted photons, which were tightly confined in the cavity.
Sgt. Foley from An Officer and a Gentleman: “Stop whispering, Sweet Pea: . . . “
This confinement helped reduce photon loss when the photons were subsequently funneled into an optical fiber and measured with a semiconducting nanowire detector.
Jeese Louise!
This so-called squeezing reduced the intensity of the fluctuations by about 13% compared with an unconfined source.
So, yeah. Just as I thought.
