Non-local control of quantum coherent perfect absorption

Guo, Ruixiang, Vetlugin, Anton, Soci, Cesare and Zheludev, Nikolai (2021) Non-local control of quantum coherent perfect absorption. Materials for Humanity, Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. (doi:10.48448/13y7-dm04).

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate that absorption of one of the photons from the entangled pair can be switched on and off by controlling the Pancharatnam-Berry phase of the other photon, the portion of the light does not go through the absorber. By using the so-called quantum coherent perfect absorption effect 1, we can expect near-perfect switching of the remote photon. The polarization entangled state between ‘idler’ and ‘signal’ photons is generated through spontaneous parametric down conversion process in the non-linear BBO crystal. The signal photon is sent to the interferometer where it excites the standing wave in the middle of the interferometer. The standing wave interacts with a thin absorber by the mechanism of coherent perfect absorption: if the absorber is at the anti-node of the standing wave, strong light-matter interaction takes place and the photon is fully absorbed; if the absorber is at the node of the standing wave, the photon is fully transmitted. The idler photon passes through the combination of three wave plates and acquires Pancharatnam-Berry phase due to the cyclic evolution of the photon polarization in Poincare sphere 2. The introduced Pancharatnam-Berry phase of the idler photon, that does not go through the interferometer, enables the phase shift inside the interferometer, thus affect the interaction of the signal photon and the absorber. We perform two-photon polarization-sensitive measurements and demonstrate the probability of the signal photon dissipation by the absorber depends on the PB phase applied to the idler photon. References 1 T. Roger, S. Vezzoli, E. Bolduc, J. Valente, J. J. F. Heitz, J. Jeffers, C. Soci, J. Leach, C. Couteau, N. I. Zheludev, and D. Faccio, Nat. Commun. 6, 7031 (2015). 2 E. Cohen, H. Larocque, F. Bouchard, F. Nejadsattari, Y. Gefen, and E. Karimi, Nat. Rev. Phys. 1, 437–449 (2019).

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Contributors

Author: Nikolai Zheludev

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