Photon subtraction and addition by a three-level atom in an optical cavity
Julio R. Gea-Banacloche, William Wilson · Physical Review A · 2013
Rosenblum et al. showed recently that a three-level atom in a cavity can function as a perfect ``photon turnstile.'' Here we explore how this device reshapes the incident pulses, generalize it to the case of an input coherent state, and consider its use in reverse as a ``photon adder.'' We find that for initially unentangled pulses, adding one photon to an $|n\ensuremath{\rangle}$ number state is possible with a success probability equal to $1/(n+1)$.