Deterministic Fock State Generation in a Birefringent Optical Cavity

Optical cavities interfaced with arrays of individual atoms provide flexible methods for quantum electrodynamics with precise control over the atom-light interaction. Tweezer arrays in cavities have been used to study collective light-scattering, enabling observation of super- and sub-radiance. In the past, we have demonstrated control over photon emission direction inside a high cooperativity cavity via the splitting of the chiral degeneracy of our bow-tie cavity. For our recent work, we exploit the bifringent cavity to generate four-photon Fock states deterministically. By driving Raman transitions, we map the ground hyperfine manifold to a Dicke ladder of states and make use of the cavity's dynamics to engineer the states. With the Zeeman splitting tuned to match the desired helicity, a σ+ (σ−) pump coherently steps the atom up (down) the ladder while emission into the opposite-helicity cavity mode produces a controlled, few-photon superradiant pulse.