Heralded Storage of a Photonic Quantum Bit in a Single Atom

Abstract

Combining techniques of cavity quantum electrodynamics, quantum measurement, and quantum feedback, we have realized the heralded transfer of a polarization qubit from a photon onto a single atom with 39% efficiency and 86% fidelity. The reverse process, namely, qubit transfer from the atom onto a given photon, is demonstrated with 88% fidelity and an estimated efficiency of up to 69%. In contrast to previous work based on two-photon interference, our scheme is robust against photon arrival-time jitter and achieves much higher efficiencies. Thus, it constitutes a key step toward the implementation of a long-distance quantum network.

6 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• A Quantum Network Node with Crossed Optical Fibre Cavities
• Nondestructive detection of photonic qubits
• Non-destructive photon detection using a single rare earth ion coupled to a photonic cavity
• Heralded entangling quantum gate via cavity-assisted photon scattering
• Squeezed Dirac and Topological Magnons in a Bosonic Honeycomb Optical Lattice
• Storing vector-vortex states of light in intra-atomic frequency comb
• Deterministic generation of high-dimensional entanglement between distant atomic memories via multi-photon exchange
• Demonstration of a passive photon-atom swap gate