Abstract

Control of a photon by a photon, a quantum analog of classical all-optical processing, is one of the key techniques on quantum information processing. However, typical optical cross-Kerr nonlinearity induced by a presence of a single photon is extremely weak for that purpose. Although we can obtain strong optical nonlinearity induced by a single photon using an atom in an optical cavity [1], the difficulty on its handling inhibits its practical application. Thus, it is strongly required to utilize single-photon nonlinearity in more convenient media, such as solid state system. A recently proposed scheme [2] opened the way to utilize rather weak optical nonlinearity to realize two-qubit quantum gate operation. In addition, from an experimental side the measurement of single-photon nonlinearity will give us a new aspect to study the interaction between media and quantum states of light. The purpose of our study is to establish the technique to measure such weak cross-Kerr nonlinearity induced by a single photon in solid states.

© 2007 IEEE