In-fiber gas-phase nanostructuring and dispersion control for non-classical light sources

In-fiber gas-phase nanostructuring and dispersion control for non-classical light sources

Fetah Benabid,

GPPMM group, XLIM, CNRS-UMR752, Université de Limoges, Limoges,  France

The talk covers the enabling power of hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HC-PCF) and their functionalized form Photonic Microcells (PMC) by showing how the association of glass, gas and light has created several paradigms in fields as different as photonics, nonlinear and high field optics, cold atom and laser metrology, and plasma physics [1].  We start by showing how HCPCF and PMC are the building blocks of the GPPMM overarching aim to develop atomic referenced photonic synthesiser. We will cover the principles of optical guidance in HC-PCF, and highlight its enabling power in handling light and gas in extreme situations such as ultra-high energy laser handling, multi-octave optical comb generation, single-cycle pulse compression, in-fibre plasma generation, and cold atom. To illustrate the enabling power of HCPCF in the field of “Time and Frequency”, we develop three examples. First, we discuss a new way of nano-structuring molecular gas using Lamb-Dicke regime of stimulated-Raman-scattering [2] to emit watt-level CW Stokes-radiation with sub-Doppler resolved spectral sidebands and with a sub-recoil linewidth as low as ~3 kHz[4]. This new route of trapping molecules opens new paths in several fields such as trapping and cooling molecules, or manufacturing of gas nanostructures such as micro-mirrors and micro-cavities. Second, as a fellow-up to the first demonstration of wall-collision free of in-fiber cold strontium, we discuss the recent IC-HCPCF mode structure assisted superradiance from cold Sr filled HCPCF [3]. This work open paths to explore miniaturization means for optical atomic clocks and supperradiant sources. The third example relates to quantum information, whereby engineering Inhibited-Coupling HCPCF (IC-HCPCF) dispersion enables the generation of various joint spectral intensity (JSI) profiles using four-wave mixing process in an inert gas. The JSI were “tuned” to cover both spectrally separable and correlated bi-photon states. This IC-HCPCF based photon-pair source, has been designed so the idler and signal frequency range were set to cover the telecom band and 700-800 nm range, which are widely used in quantum information community [4].

[1]          B. Debord, F. Amrani, L. Vincetti, F. Gérôme, and F. Benabid, Fibers 7, (2019).

[2]          M. Alharbi, A. Husakou, M. Chafer, B. Debord, F. Gérôme, and F. Benabid, Nat. Commun. 7, 12779 (2016).

[3            S. Okaba, D. Yu, L. Vincetti, F. Benabid, and H. Katori, Commun. Phys. 2, 136 (2019).

[4]          M. Cordier, A. Orieux, B. Debord, F. Gérome, A. Gorse, M. Chafer, E. Diamanti, P. Delaye, F. Benabid, and I. Zaquine, Opt. Express 27, 9803 (2019).