Atom-light interfaces for quantum information processing

Abstract

The emergence of quantum physics from the page to the lab and the world at large is an exciting development of recent years. The prospects of absolutely secure communication and efficient simulation of physical systems have spurred great human effort into understanding these possibilities and turning them into realities.

Photons are the most easily manipulated quantum particles and are a promising candidate for implementing these technologies. Limitations of photons include the difficulty of keeping objects that move at the speed of light, and producing strong interactions between particles that do not normally interact. The work presented in this thesis is motivated by the possibility of overcoming these limitations.

The ability to faithfully store and reproduce a quantum state is essential for many quantum information technologies. Quantum memories for light have been developed over the last two decades to provide this ability. The group at the Australian National University developed the gradient echo memory (GEM): A quantum state of light can be controllably stored and released from an atomic ensemble by the use of additional optical fields and magnetic field gradients. This scheme was previously shown to preserve the quantum characteristics of the light.

We used the GEM scheme with a cold rubidium ensemble to create the first optical memory that simultaneously beat the no-cloning limit, a benchmark for many of the technologies relying on quantum memories, and the loss rate for a delay line composed of optical fibre.

We also created an analogue to a pulsed optical resonator using GEM with a warm rubidium vapour. This was done by replacing the circulating optical field of a resonator with light stored in the memory, and replacing the coupling of light into and out of that circulating mode with storage and recall from the memory. The bandwidth and repetition rate of this resonator were rapidly tunable as they were controlled by external optical and magnetic fields.

We worked on implementing GEM with strings of thousands of atoms strongly coupled to the evanescent field of an optical nanofibre. This raised new possibilities for creating a true random access memory that would allow a more flexible use of the multi-mode capacity of GEM.

We developed the theory for a novel type of stationary light in the gradient echo memory. Our stationary light scheme relies on the destructive interference of counter-propagating optical fields throughout the memory. The optical intensity scales with optical depth, as with other forms of stationary light. However, as the destructive interference could be set up over a much greater distance, more of the optical depth is available for generating stationary light.

Finally, we studied how a control-phase gate for single-photon optical states could be implemented using a nonlinear interaction with stationary light. The stationary light generated by one state modulates the phase of another state stored in the memory. The second state modifies the stationary light, also producing a back-action on the first state and generating the required cross-phase shift.