Inducing disallowed two-atom transitions with temporally entangled photons. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Two uncoupled two-level atoms cannot be jointly excited by classical light under general circumstances, due to destructive interference of excitation pathways in two-photon absorption. However, with temporally entangled light, two-atom excitation is shown possible. Photons arising from three-level cascade decay are intrinsically ordered in time of emission. This field correlation induces a joint resonance in the two-atom excitation probability via suppression of one of the time-ordered excitation pathways. The relative gain in two-photon absorption increases with the time-frequency entanglement.

published proceedings

  • Phys Rev Lett

author list (cited authors)

  • Muthukrishnan, A., Agarwal, G. S., & Scully, M. O.

citation count

  • 51

complete list of authors

  • Muthukrishnan, Ashok||Agarwal, Girish S||Scully, Marlan O

publication date

  • August 2004