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Our work with [[Eduardo Zubizarreta Casalengua]] and [[Camilo Lòpez Carreño]] on [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/lpor.201900279 Conventional and Unconventional Photon Statistics] made the cover of Laser & Photonics Reviews (our second cover since [[PRL]]'s [https://journals.aps.org/prl/issues/118/21 macroscopic condensates]). The artwork is from [[Carlos Sánchez Muñoz]] and represents the basic idea of the paper, which is explained in this blog post, although it is self-explanatory for those familiar with the field. It is also simple enough that everybody can understand what it shows.
+
Our work with [[Eduardo Zubizarreta Casalengua]] and [[Camilo Lòpez Carreño]] on [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/lpor.201900279 Conventional and Unconventional Photon Statistics] made the cover of Laser & Photonics Reviews (our second cover since [[PRL]]'s [https://journals.aps.org/prl/issues/118/21 macroscopic condensates]). The artwork is from [[Carlos Sánchez Muñoz]] and represents the basic idea of the paper, which is explained in this blog post, although it is self-explanatory for those familiar with the field. It is also simple enough so that there is something for everybody to understand about it.
  
 
--more--
 
--more--
  
The idea is indeed simple: if you mix a coherent laser beam (the red, solid beam coming from the right) with the output from a quantum source (depicted by Carlos as a glowing slab of something, presumably a quantum well, bathed in the confined blueish radiation of a pillar cavity), you can get, on one harm of a beam-splitter (the cube) that introduces the two fields to each other, a much more quantum signal. That is, the fuzzy little balls—photons—glued in some sort of jelly which is the coherent, i.e., classical part of the signal (a fainter version of the other bright laser beams), get stripped of this background and emerge from the beam-splitter as pure, single, naked photons, the "quantum juice" in all its glory: the pure quantum light. On the other harm of the beam-splitter, you get an even soaker version of photons stuck in thick coherent marmalade. The scheme is a sort of quantum-cleanser: it removes the classical part, and this is what the sketch aims to show <wz tip="I don't know what the green veil floating in the background is supposed to represent, maybe the tormented soul of the observer/author/artist. ">(?!)</wz>.
+
The idea in its simplest form goes as follows: if you mix a coherent laser beam (the red, solid beam coming from the right) with the output from a quantum source (depicted by Carlos as a glowing slab of something, presumably a quantum well, bathed in the confined blueish radiation of a pillar cavity), you can get, on one harm of a beam-splitter (the cube, that introduces the two fields to each other) a much more quantum signal. That is, the fuzzy little balls—photons—glued in some sort of jelly which is the coherent, i.e., classical part of the signal (a fainter version of the other bright laser beams), get stripped free from this background and emerge from the beam-splitter as pure, single, naked photons, the "quantum juice" in all its glory: the pure quantum light. On the other harm of the beam-splitter, you get an even soaker version of photons stuck in a thicker coherent marmalade. The scheme is a sort of quantum-cleanser: it removes the classical part, and this is what the sketch aims to show <wz tip="I don't know what the green veil floating in the background is supposed to represent, maybe the tormented soul of the observer/author/artist. ">(?!)</wz>.
  
 
<center><wz tip="The basic idea: if you interfere a coherent signal to the output of a quantum source, you can remove, by classical destructive interferences, the coherent background of the latter, resulting in a pure quantum output. The excess radiation is flushed on another harm of the beam-splitter that makes the admixture, which you are welcome to ignore.">[[File:carlos-illustration-explained.jpg|400px]]</wz></center>
 
<center><wz tip="The basic idea: if you interfere a coherent signal to the output of a quantum source, you can remove, by classical destructive interferences, the coherent background of the latter, resulting in a pure quantum output. The excess radiation is flushed on another harm of the beam-splitter that makes the admixture, which you are welcome to ignore.">[[File:carlos-illustration-explained.jpg|400px]]</wz></center>
  
There is more to it than the sketch can convey. In particular, and counter-intuitively, the photons bathed in the background radiation happen to be ''bunched'', i.e., cluttered together, from a typical output of a quantum source, and this is only after removing the coherent radiation, itself neither bunched nor antibunched, that it yields the ''antibunched'' photons, i.e., separated from each others. I say counter-intuitively and that should indeed seem weird at first that
+
There is more to it than the sketch also tries to convey. In particular, and counter-intuitively, the photons bathed in the background radiation happen to be ''bunched'', i.e., cluttered together, from a typical output of a quantum source, and this is only after removing the coherent radiation, itself neither bunched nor antibunched, that it yields the ''antibunched'' photons, i.e., separated from each others. I say counter-intuitively and that should indeed seem weird at first that
  
 
: bunching + uncorrelated (neither bunched nor antibunched) = antibunching.
 
: bunching + uncorrelated (neither bunched nor antibunched) = antibunching.
Line 15: Line 15:
 
: one wave + another wave = no wave.
 
: one wave + another wave = no wave.
  
The latter is the famous interference from optics, well-known since Young and who ceases to surprise after the 19th century and high school at the latest. The former is its two-photon counterpart. In both cases, you need of course to chose the phase between the two fields right, so that, at the one photon (wave) level, the antinodes are opposite, and, at the two-photon level, the amplitudes of the two-photon component of each field are also opposite. In fact just as you can produce destructive and constructive interferences in classical outputs, in this way, merely varying the phase, you can suppress or enhance the two-photon contribution, resulting in antibunching or superbunching. This shows what happens when adding an out-of-phase coherent field to a output of a two-level system (2LS) that is coherently driven (so-called Rayleigh regime or Heitler regime):
+
The latter is the famous interference from optics, well-known since Young and that ceases to surprise after the 19th century, or high school, at the latest. The former is its two-photon counterpart. In both cases, you need of course to chose the phase between the two fields right, so that, at the one photon (wave) level, the antinodes are opposite, and, at the two-photon level, the amplitudes of the two-photon component of each field are also opposite. In fact just as you can produce destructive and constructive interferences in classical outputs, in this way, merely varying the phase, you can suppress or enhance the two-photon contribution, resulting in antibunching or superbunching. This shows what happens when adding an out-of-phase coherent field to a output of a two-level system (2LS) that is coherently driven (so-called Rayleigh regime or Heitler regime):
  
 
<center><wz tip="Tuning the two-photon statistics $g^{(2)}(0)$ by mixing the output of a two-level system with a coherent field of varying amplitude.">[[File:tuning-2photon-statistics-2LS.jpg|440px]]</wz></center>
 
<center><wz tip="Tuning the two-photon statistics $g^{(2)}(0)$ by mixing the output of a two-level system with a coherent field of varying amplitude.">[[File:tuning-2photon-statistics-2LS.jpg|440px]]</wz></center>
  
When the amplitude is zero, meaning you're not adding anything, you get the antibunching of the two-level system itself. As you increase the amplitude, you spoil that, and swapping over, you find two resonances: the constructive two-photon interference, superbunching, and the destructive two-photon interference, antibunching.
+
When the amplitude is zero, meaning you're not adding anything, you get the antibunching of the two-level system itself. As you increase the amplitude, you spoil that, and swapping over, you find two resonances: the constructive two-photon interference, superbunching, and the destructive two-photon interference, antibunching. Here you have the "paradox" in its reversed form: add uncorrelated light to antibunched—separated—photons, and it'll come up as bunched.
  
Why is this simple effect, basic idea, important? Because it's basically everywhere you care to look at in the output of coherently driven systems in their weak-excitation limit. And there is a lot of fundamental physics involved. The two antibunching peaks of the above picture, for instance, behave very differently if you look at other photon-numbers, i.e., at the three-photon, four-photon, etc., statistics. This led us to a classification of ''conventional'' and ''unconventional'' photon statistics, named after a popular terminology of ''conventional'' and ''unconventional'' photon blockade (you can replace photon by whatever: polariton, plasmon, etc.) When the driving is very small, it's always a variation of this idea, however. And we find in the literature a huge, really considerable amount of works all looking at one aspect or another of such an effect, without connecting to the underlying interference. When we made this connection, we produced a big text (that we called between ourselves "the ''mother'' paper) to cover for sufficiently different platforms to show that this was something universal. We made a silly mistake of submitting it with its TOC on the first page, that we thought would help to navigate through the long text.
+
Why is this simple effect, basic idea, important? Because it's basically everywhere you care to look at in the output of coherently driven systems in their weak-excitation limit. And there is a lot of fundamental physics involved. The two antibunching peaks of the above picture, for instance, behave very differently if you look at other photon-numbers, i.e., at the three-photon, four-photon, etc., statistics. This led us to a classification of ''conventional'' and ''unconventional'' photon statistics, named after a popular terminology of ''conventional'' and ''unconventional'' photon blockade (you can replace photon by whatever: polariton, plasmon, etc.) When the driving is very small, it's always a variation of this idea, however. And we find in the literature a huge, really considerable amount of works all looking at one aspect or another of such an effect, without connecting to the underlying interference. In particular, scanning over the key parameter-space, we exhausted the types of features that could be found, providing closed-form expressions as well as an explanation (classification) of their origin. This is such a landscape below, as computed both exactly numerically (on the plane, with red bunching, white uncorrelated and blue antibunching), and as 3D lines the antibunching lines, both CA (conventional antibunching) and UA (unconventional antibunching, dotted), combining their shape in the parameter space $(\omega_\mathrm{L}, \omega_a)/g$ of driving/detection frequencies in units of the coupling strength $g$, and their magnitude, along the $z$-axis. We also wrote an [https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/PolaritonAndJaynesCummingsBlockade/ applet] to explore the more general case:
  
<center><wz tip="How not to submit a paper to Phys. Rev. A.">[[File:Screenshot_arXiv1901.09030.jpg|400px]]</wz></center>
+
<center><wz tagtotip="UACA">[[File:UA-CA.jpg|400px]]</wz></center>
 +
<span id="UACA">Landscape of two-photon statistics $g^{(2)}(0)$ from the Jaynes-Cummings system under weak coherent driving, as a function of where you drive it ($\omega_\mathrm{L}$) and where you detect the light ($\omega_a$), both in units of the coupling strength $g$.</span>
  
This triggered the immediate reaction, in particular from two of our Referees, that the text looked like a review and would better be published as such. That was a disappointment, of course, since although it was reproducing known results, and that several bits had already been touched upon from various Authors, the bulk of the findings were original. Even the editor was inviting us to submit as a Review somewhere else. So we did. And of course, what happened is that when we submitted it in this form, we got the opposite feedback that much of it appeared to be original research. We've been lucky though that both those thinking it was a review were recognizing some novelty that could be published in PRA and those thinking it was not a review agreed it was bringing things together, so could be published as a review provided another text would extract the novelty part. So we went for a dual submission.
+
This is a complicated figure to digest, but it tells you everything that there is to know of two-photon statistics (antibunching and superbunching) from the weakly-coherently driven Jaynes--Cumming system, bringing together features otherwise found scattered in the literature. When we made this connection, we produced a big text (that we called between ourselves "the ''mother'' paper") to cover for sufficiently different platforms to show that this was something universal. We made a silly mistake of submitting it with its TOC on the first page, that we thought would help to navigate through the long text.
 +
 
 +
<center><wz tip="How not to submit a paper to Phys. Rev. A.">[[File:Screenshot_arXiv1901.09030.jpg|300px]]</wz></center>
 +
 
 +
This triggered the immediate reaction, in particular from two of our Referees, that the text looked like a review and would better be published as such. That was a disappointment, of course, since although it was reproducing known results (as particular cases), and that several bits had already been touched upon from various Authors (such as homodyning), the bulk of the findings were original. Even the editor was inviting us to submit as a Review somewhere else. So we did. And of course, what happened is that when we submitted it in this form, we got the opposite feedback that much of it appeared to be original research.
 +
 
 +
So we had to split in two. Not easy, really. Especially as the "Reviews" referee were asking for more extensions: "''what happens with dephasing?''", and it's really interesting because this actually strengthens the separation of the two types of antibunching, conventional and unconventional: one is robust to dephasing, the other is not. So we add another Section. "''How about the time dependence $g^{(2)}(\tau)$?''", and that too is really interesting because there are well-known strong oscillations (that's why the Referees ask), which had caused much chagrin to unconventional blockade people, and in our picture we see they are neatly explained in the simplest possible way, as the beating from the two fields that you add, the coherent and the quantum ones, if they turn out to have different frequencies. So we add still another Section. Meanwhile, we keep discovering new things. For instance, in configurations where the unconventional and conventional antibunching meet, one has the best of both words: a lot of signal, a strong and robust antibunching. So our Research-PRA paper grows as well. Since 2018, we're stuck in a monster paper that we can't publish and which keeps inflating. Well, eventually, we got there. The paper was accepted as a Reviews in the 2nd journal of Optics, and made its cover, which we'll probably be displaying for a long time to come. As it's such a simple and deep idea, constructive and destructive interferences at the multiphoton level, it might be that others find it useful to display it too.
 +
 
 +
The covers of Laser & Photonics Review are piece of art. They started with an inset illustration on a yellow background, as shown below (with, for this first edition, polymer micro-spheres approaching a pattern of gold pads illuminated  by a red laser which traps them):
 +
 
 +
<center><wz tip="Surface‐plasmon‐based optical manipulation, by R. Quidant & C. Girard, on the first cover of the (New) journal.">[[File:LPR-cover-1-2.jpg|300px]]</wz></center>
 +
 
 +
This was a nice, highly sui generi style, which changed in [[2014]] with a more modern, aesthetical, but also more common, full-page cover. Here is the gallery of last year's (30) entries:
 +
 
 +
<center><wz tip="">[[File:all-covers-LPR-2019.png|650px]]</wz></center>
 +
 
 +
We are happy that this very beautiful Physics, this outstanding, over two-year effort, finally led us to the front page of this great journal!

Revision as of 18:57, 16 May 2020

Our work with Eduardo Zubizarreta Casalengua and Camilo Lòpez Carreño on Conventional and Unconventional Photon Statistics made the cover of Laser & Photonics Reviews (our second cover since PRL's macroscopic condensates). The artwork is from Carlos Sánchez Muñoz and represents the basic idea of the paper, which is explained in this blog post, although it is self-explanatory for those familiar with the field. It is also simple enough so that there is something for everybody to understand about it.

The idea in its simplest form goes as follows: if you mix a coherent laser beam (the red, solid beam coming from the right) with the output from a quantum source (depicted by Carlos as a glowing slab of something, presumably a quantum well, bathed in the confined blueish radiation of a pillar cavity), you can get, on one harm of a beam-splitter (the cube, that introduces the two fields to each other) a much more quantum signal. That is, the fuzzy little balls—photons—glued in some sort of jelly which is the coherent, i.e., classical part of the signal (a fainter version of the other bright laser beams), get stripped free from this background and emerge from the beam-splitter as pure, single, naked photons, the "quantum juice" in all its glory: the pure quantum light. On the other harm of the beam-splitter, you get an even soaker version of photons stuck in a thicker coherent marmalade. The scheme is a sort of quantum-cleanser: it removes the classical part, and this is what the sketch aims to show (?!).

Carlos-illustration-explained.jpg

There is more to it than the sketch also tries to convey. In particular, and counter-intuitively, the photons bathed in the background radiation happen to be bunched, i.e., cluttered together, from a typical output of a quantum source, and this is only after removing the coherent radiation, itself neither bunched nor antibunched, that it yields the antibunched photons, i.e., separated from each others. I say counter-intuitively and that should indeed seem weird at first that

bunching + uncorrelated (neither bunched nor antibunched) = antibunching.

But a second's thought about it shows that it is nothing more than the well-known, equally paradoxical at first but easily understood:

one wave + another wave = no wave.

The latter is the famous interference from optics, well-known since Young and that ceases to surprise after the 19th century, or high school, at the latest. The former is its two-photon counterpart. In both cases, you need of course to chose the phase between the two fields right, so that, at the one photon (wave) level, the antinodes are opposite, and, at the two-photon level, the amplitudes of the two-photon component of each field are also opposite. In fact just as you can produce destructive and constructive interferences in classical outputs, in this way, merely varying the phase, you can suppress or enhance the two-photon contribution, resulting in antibunching or superbunching. This shows what happens when adding an out-of-phase coherent field to a output of a two-level system (2LS) that is coherently driven (so-called Rayleigh regime or Heitler regime):

Tuning-2photon-statistics-2LS.jpg

When the amplitude is zero, meaning you're not adding anything, you get the antibunching of the two-level system itself. As you increase the amplitude, you spoil that, and swapping over, you find two resonances: the constructive two-photon interference, superbunching, and the destructive two-photon interference, antibunching. Here you have the "paradox" in its reversed form: add uncorrelated light to antibunched—separated—photons, and it'll come up as bunched.

Why is this simple effect, basic idea, important? Because it's basically everywhere you care to look at in the output of coherently driven systems in their weak-excitation limit. And there is a lot of fundamental physics involved. The two antibunching peaks of the above picture, for instance, behave very differently if you look at other photon-numbers, i.e., at the three-photon, four-photon, etc., statistics. This led us to a classification of conventional and unconventional photon statistics, named after a popular terminology of conventional and unconventional photon blockade (you can replace photon by whatever: polariton, plasmon, etc.) When the driving is very small, it's always a variation of this idea, however. And we find in the literature a huge, really considerable amount of works all looking at one aspect or another of such an effect, without connecting to the underlying interference. In particular, scanning over the key parameter-space, we exhausted the types of features that could be found, providing closed-form expressions as well as an explanation (classification) of their origin. This is such a landscape below, as computed both exactly numerically (on the plane, with red bunching, white uncorrelated and blue antibunching), and as 3D lines the antibunching lines, both CA (conventional antibunching) and UA (unconventional antibunching, dotted), combining their shape in the parameter space $(\omega_\mathrm{L}, \omega_a)/g$ of driving/detection frequencies in units of the coupling strength $g$, and their magnitude, along the $z$-axis. We also wrote an applet to explore the more general case:

UA-CA.jpg

Landscape of two-photon statistics $g^{(2)}(0)$ from the Jaynes-Cummings system under weak coherent driving, as a function of where you drive it ($\omega_\mathrm{L}$) and where you detect the light ($\omega_a$), both in units of the coupling strength $g$.

This is a complicated figure to digest, but it tells you everything that there is to know of two-photon statistics (antibunching and superbunching) from the weakly-coherently driven Jaynes--Cumming system, bringing together features otherwise found scattered in the literature. When we made this connection, we produced a big text (that we called between ourselves "the mother paper") to cover for sufficiently different platforms to show that this was something universal. We made a silly mistake of submitting it with its TOC on the first page, that we thought would help to navigate through the long text.

Screenshot arXiv1901.09030.jpg

This triggered the immediate reaction, in particular from two of our Referees, that the text looked like a review and would better be published as such. That was a disappointment, of course, since although it was reproducing known results (as particular cases), and that several bits had already been touched upon from various Authors (such as homodyning), the bulk of the findings were original. Even the editor was inviting us to submit as a Review somewhere else. So we did. And of course, what happened is that when we submitted it in this form, we got the opposite feedback that much of it appeared to be original research.

So we had to split in two. Not easy, really. Especially as the "Reviews" referee were asking for more extensions: "what happens with dephasing?", and it's really interesting because this actually strengthens the separation of the two types of antibunching, conventional and unconventional: one is robust to dephasing, the other is not. So we add another Section. "How about the time dependence $g^{(2)}(\tau)$?", and that too is really interesting because there are well-known strong oscillations (that's why the Referees ask), which had caused much chagrin to unconventional blockade people, and in our picture we see they are neatly explained in the simplest possible way, as the beating from the two fields that you add, the coherent and the quantum ones, if they turn out to have different frequencies. So we add still another Section. Meanwhile, we keep discovering new things. For instance, in configurations where the unconventional and conventional antibunching meet, one has the best of both words: a lot of signal, a strong and robust antibunching. So our Research-PRA paper grows as well. Since 2018, we're stuck in a monster paper that we can't publish and which keeps inflating. Well, eventually, we got there. The paper was accepted as a Reviews in the 2nd journal of Optics, and made its cover, which we'll probably be displaying for a long time to come. As it's such a simple and deep idea, constructive and destructive interferences at the multiphoton level, it might be that others find it useful to display it too.

The covers of Laser & Photonics Review are piece of art. They started with an inset illustration on a yellow background, as shown below (with, for this first edition, polymer micro-spheres approaching a pattern of gold pads illuminated by a red laser which traps them):

LPR-cover-1-2.jpg

This was a nice, highly sui generi style, which changed in 2014 with a more modern, aesthetical, but also more common, full-page cover. Here is the gallery of last year's (30) entries:

All-covers-LPR-2019.png

We are happy that this very beautiful Physics, this outstanding, over two-year effort, finally led us to the front page of this great journal!