Switching and Counting With Atomic Vapors in Photonic-Crystal Fibers

Abstract

We review our recent experiments demonstrating a hollow-core photonic-crystal fiber loaded with laser-cooled atomic vapor as a system for all-optical switching with pulses containing few hundred photons. Additionally, we discuss the outlooks for improving the efficiency of this switching scheme and present preliminary results geared toward using the system as a photon-number resolving detector.