High-purity single-photon generation based on cavity QED

Abstract

We propose a scheme for generating a high-purity single photon on the basis of cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). This scheme employs a four-level system including two excited states, two ground states, and two driving lasers; this structure allows the suppression of the re-excitation process due to the atomic decay, which is known to significantly degrade the single-photon purity in state-of-the-art photon sources using a three-level system. Our analysis shows that the re-excitation probability arbitrarily approaches zero without sacrificing the photon generation probability when increasing the power of the driving laser between the excited states. This advantage is achievable by using current cavity-QED technologies. Our scheme can contribute to developing distributed quantum computation or quantum communication with high accuracy.