A Simple and Efficient Absorption Filter for Single Photons from a Cold Atom Quantum Memory

Abstract

The ability to filter unwanted light signals is critical to the operation of quantum memories based on neutral atom ensembles. Here we demonstrate an efficient frequency filter which uses a vapor cell filled with ${}^{85}$Rb and a buffer gas to attenuate both residual laser light and noise photons by nearly two orders of magnitude with little loss to the single photons associated with our cold ${}^{87}$Rb quantum memory. This simple, passive filter provides an additional 18 dB attenuation of our pump laser and erroneous spontaneous emissions for every 1 dB loss of the single photon signal. We show that the addition of a frequency filter increases the non-classical correlations and readout efficiency of our quantum memory by $\approx 35\%$.

11 pages, 10 figures, will be submitted to refereed journal

References in corpus (6)

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Single-photon-level light storage in cold atoms using the Autler-Townes splitting protocol
• High teleportation rates using cold-atom ensemble based quantum repeaters with Rydberg blockade
• Magnetically tuned, robust and efficient filtering system for spatially multimode quantum memory in warm atomic vapors