Gaeta Group Research Named an APS Highlight of the Year

Recent work from Prof. Alexander Gaeta's group, Color Duality in Photons, was selected as one of the APS Highlights of the year.

Their research, "Ramsey Interference with Single Photons," by Stéphane Clemmen, Alessandro Farsi, Sven Ramelow, and Alexander L. Gaeta, was originally published in Physics Review Letters, 117, 223601, November 23, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.223601

Abstract: Interferometry using discrete energy levels of nuclear, atomic, or molecular systems is the foundation for a wide range of physical phenomena and enables powerful techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance, electron spin resonance, Ramsey-based spectroscopy, and laser or maser technology. It also plays a unique role in quantum information processing as qubits may be implemented as energy superposition states of simple quantum systems. Here, we demonstrate quantum interference involving energy states of single quanta of light. In full analogy to the energy levels of atoms or nuclear spins, we implement a Ramsey interferometer with single photons. We experimentally generate energy superposition states of a single photon and manipulate them with unitary transformations to realize arbitrary projective measurements. Our approach opens the path for frequency-encoded photonic qubits in quantum information processing and quantum communication.