Seeing a single photon without destroying it

Light detection is usually a destructive process, in that detectors annihilate photons and convert them into electrical signals, making it impossible to see a single photon twice. But this limitation is not fundamental—quantum non-demolition strategies1,2,3 permit repeated measurements of physically observable quantities, yielding identical results. For example, quantum non-demolition measurements of light intensity have been demonstrated4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14, suggesting possibilities for detecting weak forces and gravitational waves3. But such experiments, based on nonlinear optics, are sensitive only to macroscopic photon fluxes. The non-destructive measurement of a single photon requires an extremely strong matter–radiation coupling; this can be realized in cavity quantum electrodynamics15, where the strength of the interaction between an atom and a photon can overwhelm all dissipative couplings to the environment. Here we report a cavity quantum electrodynamics experiment in which we detect a single photon non-destructively. We use atomic interferometry to measure the phase shift in an atomic wavefunction, caused by a cycle of photon absorption and emission. Our method amounts to a restricted quantum non-demolition measurement which can be applied only to states containing one or zero photons. It may lead to quantum logic gates16 based on cavity quantum electrodynamics, and multi-atom entanglement17.