Coherent propagation of a single photon in a lossless medium: $0π$ pulse formation, slow photon, storage and retrieval in multiple temporal modes

Abstract: Single-photon coherent optics represents a fundamental importance for the investigation of quantum light-matter interactions. While most work has considered the interaction in the steady-state regime, here we demonstrate that a single-photon pulse shorter than any relaxation time in a medium propagates without energy loss and is consistently transformed into a zero-area pulse. A general analytical solution is found for photon passage through a cold ensemble of $\Lambda$-type atoms confined inside a hollow core of a single-mode photonic-crystal fiber. We use the robust far off-resonant Raman scheme to control the pulse reshaping by an intense control laser beam and show that in the case of cw control field, for exact two-photon resonance, the outgoing photon displays an oscillating temporal distribution, which is the quantum counterpart of a classical field ringing, while for nonzero two-photon detuning a slow photon is produced. We demonstrate also that a train of readout control pulses coherently recalls the stored photon in many well-separated temporal modes, thus producing time-bin entangled single-photon states. Such states, which allow sharing quantum information among many users, are highly demanded for applications in long-distance quantum communication.