Storage and retrieval of single photons transmitted between remote quantum memories

By T. Chanelière, Dzmitry N. Matsukevich, S. Jenkins, Shau-Yu Lan, T. Kennedy, A. Kuzmich. Nature, 2005

609 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An elementary quantum network operation involves storing a qubit state in an atomic quantum memory node, and then retrieving and transporting the information through a single photon excitation to a remote quantum memory node for further storage or analysis. Implementations of quantum network operations are thus conditioned on the ability to realize matter-to-light and/or light-to-matter quantum state mappings. Here we report the generation, transmission, storage and retrieval of single quanta using two remote atomic ensembles. A single photon is generated from a cold atomic ensemble at one site , and is directed to another site through 100 metres of optical fibre. The photon is then converted into a single collective atomic excitation using a dark-state polariton approach. After a programmable storage time, the atomic excitation is converted back into a single photon. This is demonstrated experimentally, for a storage time of 0.5 microseconds, by measurement of an anti-correlation parameter. Storage times exceeding ten microseconds are observed by intensity cross-correlation measurements. This storage period is two orders of magnitude longer than the time required to achieve conversion between photonic and atomic quanta. The controlled transfer of single quanta between remote quantum memories constitutes an important step towards distributed quantum networks.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8884eecb78dd7f65fd0e8634b9b96a71b2998dc3

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum Secure Direct Communication with Quantum Memory. (2016, background): “iple experimental demonstration. However, for a practical application, a quantum memory is greatly needed because it is robust against decoherence and convertible to quantum states of light on demand [21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26], which indicates effective control for transferring a message in the time d”
Multiphoton entanglement and interferometry (2008, background): “Controllable generation, storage and retrieval of single photons with tunable frequency, timing and bandwidth have been demonstrated (Chou et al., 2004; Eisaman et al., 2004, 2005; Chanelière et al., 2005).”
Towards high-speed optical quantum memories (2009, background): “Memories based on measurement and feedback have also been develope”
Quantum repeaters based on atomic ensembles and linear optics (2009, methodology): “…the filtering of the Stokes and anti-Stokes photons with cold ensembles (see section V.A.1) led to improved suppression of the two-photon component (Chanelière et al., 2005; Chen et al., 2006), with the best values of α close (Matsukevich et al., 2006a) or below 0.01 (Laurat et al., 2006) (see…”
Hybrid semiconductor-atomic interface: slowing down single photons from a quantum dot (2011, background): “In later works, low group velocities were reported for single-photon pulses generated from atomic ensemble”
A millisecond quantum memory for scalable quantum networks (2008, background): “The idea presented in this work can also be applied to quantum memory based on electromagnetically induced transparenc”