Emission of Microwave Photon Pairs by a Tunnel Junction

Abstract

Generation and control of non-classical electromagnetic fields is of crucial importance for quantum information physics. While usual methods for the production of such fields rely on a non-linearity (of a crystal, a Josephson junction, etc.), a recent experiment performed on a normal conductor, a tunnel junction under microwave irradiation, has unveiled an alternative: the use of electron shot noise in a quantum conductor\cite{PAN_squeezing}. Here we show that such a device can emit \emph{pairs of microwave photons} of different frequencies with a rate as high as that of superconducting Josephson junctions\cite{Flurin}. This results in intensity fluctuations of the photon field at two different frequencies being correlated below the photon shot noise,i.e. two-mode amplitude squeezing. Our experiment constitutes a fundamental step towards the understanding of electronic noise in terms of quantum optics, and shows that even a normal conductor could be used as a resource for quantum information processing.