Abstract
We report the experimental demonstration of efficient interaction of multi-kilo-electron-volt heralded x-ray photons with a beam splitter. The measured heralded photon rate at the outputs of the beam splitter is about 0.01 counts/s which is comparable to the rate in the absence of the beam splitter. We use this beam splitter together with photon number and photon energy resolving detectors to show directly that when a single x-ray photon interacts with a beam splitter it can only be detected at either of the ports of the beam splitter but not at both simultaneously, leading to a strong anticorrelation between the detection events at the two output ports. Our experiment demonstrates the major advantage of x rays for quantum optics - the possibility to observe experimental results with high fidelity and with negligible background.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 013603 |
| Journal | Physical Review Letters |
| Volume | 127 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2 Jul 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2021 American Physical Society.
Funding
This research was carried out at beamline P09 at PETRA III at DESY, a member of the Helmholtz Association (HGF). We would like to thank David Reuther for assistance during the experiment. The research leading to this result has been supported by the project CALIPSOplus under Grant No. 730872 from the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation HORIZON 2020. This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), Grant No. 201/17. The authors thank Eliahu Cohen for helpful discussions. Ralf Röhlsberger acknowledges financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft via Cluster of Excellence “The Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging”–EXC 1074–project ID 194651731.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Horizon 2020 Framework Programme | 730872 |
| Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft | 194651731 |
| Israel Science Foundation | 201/17 |
| Horizon 2020 |