Observation of scalable sub-Poissonian-field lasing in a microlaser

Byoung-Moo Ann; Younghoon Song; Junki Kim; Daeho Yang; Kyungwon An

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-53525-3

Observation of scalable sub-Poissonian-field lasing in a microlaser

Sci Rep. 2019 Nov 19;9(1):17110. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-53525-3.

Authors

Byoung-Moo Ann^{1

2}, Younghoon Song^{1

3}, Junki Kim^{1

4}, Daeho Yang^{1

5}, Kyungwon An⁶

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy & Institute of Applied Physics, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, Korea.
² Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology, 2628 CJ, Delft, The Netherlands.
³ Department of Field Application, ASML Korea, Hwaseong, 18449, Korea.
⁴ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 27708, USA.
⁵ Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Suwon, 16678, Korea.
⁶ Department of Physics and Astronomy & Institute of Applied Physics, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, Korea. kwan@phya.snu.ac.kr.

Abstract

Sub-Poisson field with much reduced fluctuations in a cavity can boost quantum precision measurements via cavity-enhanced light-matter interactions. Strong coupling between an atom and a cavity mode has been utilized to generate highly sub-Poisson fields. However, a macroscopic number of optical intracavity photons with more than 3 dB variance reduction has not been possible. Here, we report sub-Poisson field lasing in a microlaser operating with hundreds of atoms with well-regulated atom-cavity coupling and interaction time. Its photon-number variance was 4 dB below the standard quantum limit while the intracavity mean photon number scalable up to 600. The highly sub-Poisson photon statistics were not deteriorated by simultaneous interaction of a large number of atoms. Our finding suggests an effective pathway to widely scalable near-Fock-state lasing at the macroscopic scale.