Nonlinear optics with less than one photon

Phys Rev Lett. 2001 Sep 17;87(12):123603. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.123603. Epub 2001 Aug 30.

Abstract

We demonstrate suppression and enhancement of spontaneous parametric down-conversion via quantum interference with two weak fields from a local oscillator (LO). Effectively, pairs of LO photons up-convert with high efficiency for appropriate phase settings, exhibiting an effective nonlinearity enhanced by at least 10 orders of magnitude. This constitutes a two-photon switch and promises to be applicable to a wide variety of quantum nonlinear optical phenomena.