Enhancement of Rydberg-mediated single-photon nonlinearities by electrically tuned F\"orster Resonances

Abstract

Mapping the strong interaction between Rydberg atoms onto single photons via electromagnetically induced transparency enables manipulation of light on the single photon level and novel few-photon devices such as all-optical switches and transistors operated by individual photons. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that Stark-tuned F\"orster resonances can substantially increase this effective interaction between individual photons. This technique boosts the gain of a single-photon transistor to over 100, enhances the non-destructive detection of single Rydberg atoms to a fidelity beyond 0.8, and enables high precision spectroscopy on Rydberg pair states. On top, we achieve a gain larger than 2 with gate photon read-out after the transistor operation. Theory models for Rydberg polariton propagation on F\"orster resonance and for the projection of the stored spin-wave yield excellent agreement to our data and successfully identify the main decoherence mechanism of the Rydberg transistor, paving the way towards photonic quantum gates.