Experimental investigation of delayed self-interference for single photons

Abstract

A photon echo experiment has been performed using accumulated highly attenuated laser pulses. We show experimentally that the photon echo process can be performed with, on the average, less than one photon in each pair of excitation pulses. The results support an interpretation where this non-linear process can be performed with, on the average, less than one photon shared between two of the optical fields involved in the degenerate four-wave mixing process. Further, we argue that the experiment can be interpreted as a form of delayed self-interference for photon wave packets that do not overlap in both space and time.