Re: The time it takes to emit one photon

"nightlight" <nightlight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:1127179612.816435.279440@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

> There is no experiment to date which has shown that the
> probability of "trigger" (which is, after all, a mere convention based
> on arbitrarily chosen cutoff in the intensity of the photocurrents,
> defining the 1-bit approximation of the photocurrent intensity i.e. the
> "trigger", cf. [1]) at location A is affected in any way by the
> "trigger" or "non-trigger" at some space-like location B. (The only
> experiments, such as [2], which make such claims, blatantly cheat.

What about
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1095232v1?
ijkey=KrrraAggFbbXQ&keytype=ref&siteid=sci
[quote]
Deterministic Generation of Single Photons from One Atom Trapped in a
Cavity

J. McKeever 1, A. Boca 1, A. D. Boozer 1, R. Miller 1, J. R. Buck 1, A.
Kuzmich 1, H. J. Kimble 1*

1 Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics 12-33, California Institute of
Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: hjkimble@xxxxxxxxxxxx

A single Cesium atom trapped within the mode of an optical cavity is used
to generate single photons on demand. The photon wavepackets are emitted as
a Gaussian beam with temporal profile and repetition rate controlled by
external driving fields. Each generation attempt is inferred to succeed
with probability near unity, while the efficiency for creating an
unpolarized photon in the total cavity output is 0.69 ± 0.10, as limited by
passive cavity losses. An average of 1.4 x 10^4 photons are produced by
each trapped atom. These results constitute an important step in quantum
information science, for example toward the realization of distributed
quantum networking.
[unquote]

How do such experiments 'cheat'?

They have other interesting experiments also.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~qoptics/atomorbits/

--
bz

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.

bz+spr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap

.