Ultra-bright biphoton emission from an atomic vapor based on Doppler-free four-wave-mixing and collective emission

We propose a novel `butterfly’ level scheme to generate highly correlated photon pairs from atomic vapors. With multi-photon Doppler-free pumping, background Rayleigh scattering is dipole-forbidden and collective emission is permitted in all directions. This results in usable pairs generated simultaneously in the full $4\pi$ solid angle. Collecting these pairs can produce photon pairs at a rate of $\sim {10}^{12}$ per second, given only moderate ensemble sizes of $\sim {10}^6$ atoms.