Long Light Storage Time in an Optical Fiber

Abstract

Light storage in an optical fiber is an attractive component in quantum optical delay line technologies. Although silica-core optical fibers are excellent in transmitting broadband optical signals, it is challenging to tailor their dispersive property to slow down a light pulse or store it in the silica-core for a long delay time. Coupling a dispersive and coherent medium with an optical fiber is promising in supporting long optical delay. Here, we load cold Rb atomic vapor into an optical trap inside a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber, and store the phase of the light in a long-lived spin-wave formed by atoms and retrieve it after a fully controllable delay time using electromagnetically-induced-transparency (EIT). We achieve over 50 ms of storage time and the result is equivalent to 8.7x10^-5 dB s^-1 of propagation loss in an optical fiber. Our demonstration could be used for buffering and regulating classical and quantum information flow between remote networks.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Large array of Schrödinger cat states facilitated by an optical waveguide
• Photon retention in coherently excited nitrogen ions
• Loading and spatially-resolved characterization of a cold atomic ensemble inside a hollow-core fiber
• Improving entanglement generation rates in trapped ion quantum networks using nondestructive photon measurement and storage
• Light Storage in Light Cages: A Scalable Platform for Multiplexed Quantum Memories