Spatially dependent atom-photon entanglement

Abstract

The atom-photon entanglement using the Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams is studied in the closed-loop three-level V-type quantum systems. We consider two schemes with near-degenerate and non-degenerate upper levels: in the first, the effect of the quantum interference due to the spontaneous emission is taken into account and in the second, a microwave plane wave is applied to the upper levels transition. It is shown that the atom-photon entanglement in both schemes depends on the intensity profile as well as the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of the applied fields so that the various spatially dependent entanglement patterns can be generated by Laguerre-Gaussian beams with different OAMs. However, due to the zero intensity,no entanglement appears in the center of the optical vortex beams. As a result, the entanglement between dressed atom and its spontaneous emissions in different points of the atomic vapor cell can be controlled by the OAM of the applied fields. Moreover, our numerical results show that the number of the local maximum degree of entanglement (DEM) peaks depends on the OAM of the applied fields. The degrees of freedom for OAM play a crucial role in spatially dependent atom-photon entanglement in such a way that it may possess broad applications in high-dimensional quantum information processing and data storage.