Dataset for paper: Improving the indistinguishability of single photons from an ion-cavity system

<b>Data file for the figures in paper published in Physical Review A, Sept 2020</b><br><br>The file contains all data to reproduce the figures in the publication. Details are described within the spreadsheet.<br><br><b>Abstract</b>We investigate two schemes for generating indistinguishable single photons, a key feature of quantum networks, from a trapped ion coupled to an optical cavity. Through selection of the initial state in a cavity-assisted Raman transition, we suppress the detrimental effects of spontaneous emission on the photon's coherence length, measuring a visibility of 81(2)% without subtraction of background counts in a Hong-Ou-Mandel interference measurement, the highest reported for an ion-cavity system. In comparison, a visibility of 50(2)% was measured using a more conventional single-photon scheme. We demonstrate through numerical analysis of the single-photon generation process that our scheme produces photons of a given indistinguishability with a greater efficiency than the conventional one. Single-photon schemes such as the one demonstrated here have applications in distributed quantum computing and communications, which rely on high-fidelity entanglement swapping and state transfer through indistinguishable single photons.<br>