Abstract
The relaxation of a quantum field stored in a high- superconducting cavity is monitored by nonresonant Rydberg atoms. The field, subjected to repetitive quantum nondemolition photon counting, undergoes jumps between photon number states. We select ensembles of field realizations evolving from a given Fock state and reconstruct the subsequent evolution of their photon number distributions. We realize in this way a tomography of the photon number relaxation process yielding all the jump rates between Fock states. The damping rates of the photon states () are found to increase linearly with . The results are in excellent agreement with theory including a small thermal contribution.
- Received 8 September 2008
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.240402
©2008 American Physical Society
Viewpoint
Filling a cavity with photons, and watching them leave
Published 8 December 2008
Preparing a harmonic oscillator in a state with a well-defined energy is a tricky business. With the new tools provided by cavity and circuit quantum electrodynamics it is now possible to make these pure quantum states and watch how they evolve in time.
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