Wigner spectrum and coherent feedback control of continuous-mode single-photon Fock states

Abstract

Single photons are very useful resources in quantum information science. In real applications it is often required that the photons have a well-defined spectral (or equivalently temporal) modal structure. For example, a rising exponential pulse is able to fully excite a two-level atom while a Gaussian pulse cannot. This motivates the study of continuous-mode single-photon Fock states. Such states are characterized by a spectral (or temporal) pulse shape. In this paper we investigate the statistical property of continuous- mode single-photon Fock states. Instead of the commonly used normal ordering (Wick order), the tool we proposed is the Wigner spectrum. The Wigner spectrum has two advantages: (1) it allows to study continuous- mode single-photon Fock states in the time domain and frequency domain simultaneously; (2) because it can deal with the Dirac delta function directly, it has the potential to provide more information than the normal ordering where the Dirac delta function is always discarded. We also show how various control methods in particular coherent feedback control can be used to manipulate the pulse shapes of continuous- mode single-photon Fock states.