"Shake The Emitter, Get a Comb", published in Physical Review Letters

Single photon emitters are among the most important resources in the quantum technology, especially in quantum communications. Nevertheless, the faithful storage and retrieval of these flying qubits, the single-photons, is still challenging. Atomic Frequency Combs  (AFC) are amongst the best candidates. Nevertheless, the current proposals for their implementation still suffer some shortages, most importantly the scalability.

In a recent work, published in Physical Review Letters, researchers in the Theoretical Quantum Optics Group have proposed a setup that partly comes up with a solution to this problem. Frequency combs with fine and orderly teeth are generated out of the single photons emitted from a jiggling atom (color center). When the electronic degrees of freedom of a quantum emitter strongly couple to its motion the radiative transitions get modulated so strongly that the outgoing photons start forming a regulatory framework in the frequency domain; a comb. We show that this can indeed happen for a color center in a freestanding hexagonal boron nitride membrane where the coupling is provided by the Casimir effect.

source:  Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 023602 (2019)s