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Interference of spontaneous emission of light from two solid-state atomic ensembles

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Published 21 November 2007 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd
, , Citation M Afzelius et al 2007 New J. Phys. 9 413 DOI 10.1088/1367-2630/9/11/413

1367-2630/9/11/413

Abstract

We report an interference experiment of spontaneous emission of light from two distant solid-state ensembles of atoms that are coherently excited by a short laser pulse. The ensembles are erbium ions doped into two LiNbO3 crystals with channel waveguides, which are placed in the two arms of a Mach–Zehnder interferometer. The light that is spontaneously emitted after the excitation pulse shows first-order interference. By a strong collective enhancement of the emission, the atoms behave as ideal two-level quantum systems and no which-path information is left in the atomic ensembles after emission of a photon. This results in a high fringe visibility of 95%, which implies that the observed spontaneous emission is highly coherent.

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