Abstract

Efficient coupling between photons and single emitters has become routine over the past decades by making use of high-finesse cavities, by exploiting near-field effects, or more recently via high numerical aperture objectives [1-4]. However, each of these approaches lacks the prospect of scalability, which is pivotal for building up a complex network of a mesoscopic number of quantum emitters coupled to each other via the same photonic mode. Dielectric waveguides with an effective mode area that is comparable to the interaction cross section of an ideal two-level system provide a one-dimensional bus. Here, a single input photon can be either spread over many quantum systems or can be strongly localized depending on the particular spatial and spectral arrangement of single emitters. In such highly correlated systems cooperative behaviour can build up, resulting in intriguing phenomena such as fermionization of light or a quantum optical Josephson interferometer [5,6]. However, experimental realizations of one-dimensional interfaces are still rare with examples including atoms trapped around nanofibers and quantum dots placed on nanofibers or in photonic crystal waveguides [7,8].

© 2015 IEEE