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arXiv:0903.3153 · Physical Review A

Creating single collective atomic excitations via spontaneous Raman emission in inhomogeneously broadened systems: Beyond the adiabatic approximation

Carlo Ottaviani, Christoph Simon, Hugues de Riedmatten, Mikael Afzelius, Björn Lauritzen, Nicolas Sangouard, Nicolas Gisin

Published Jun 19, 2009• 15 citations
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Abstract

The creation of single collective excitations in atomic ensembles via spontaneous Raman emission plays a key role in several quantum communication protocols, starting with the seminal Duan-Lukin-Cirac-Zoller protocol [L.-M. Duan, M. D. Lukin, J. I. Cirac, and P. Zoller, Nature (London) 414, 413 (2001)]. This process is usually analyzed theoretically under the assumptions that the write laser pulse inducing the Raman transition is far off resonance and that the atomic ensemble is only homogeneously broadened. Here we study the impact of near-resonance excitation for inhomogeneously broadened ensembles on the collective character of the created atomic excitation. Our results are particularly relevant for experiments with hot atomic gases and for potential future solid-state implementations.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.79.063828

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The creation of single collective excitations in atomic ensembles via spontaneous Raman emission plays a key role in several quantum communication protocols, starting with the seminal Duan-Lukin-Cirac-Zoller protocol [L.-M. Duan, M. D. Lukin, J. I. Cirac, and P. Zoller, Nature (London) 414, 413 (2001)]. This process is usually analyzed theoretically under the assumptions that the write laser pulse inducing the Raman transition is far off resonance and that the atomic ensemble is only homogeneously broadened. Here we study the impact of near-resonance excitation for inhomogeneously broadened ensembles on the collective character of the created atomic excitation. Our results are particularly relevant for experiments with hot atomic gases and for potential future solid-state implementations.
In the famous quantum communication scheme developed by Duan et al. [L.M. Duan, M.D. Lukin, J.I. Cirac, and P. Zoller, Nature (London) 414 (2001) 413 ], the probability of successful generating a symmetric collective atomic state with a single-photon emitted have to be far smaller than 1 to obtain an acceptable entangled state. Based on strong dipole-dipole interaction between two Rydberg atoms, two simultaneous excitations in an atomic ensemble are greatly suppressed, which makes it possible to excite a mesoscopic cold atomic ensemble into a near-ideal singly-excited symmetric collective state accompanied by a signal-photon with near unity success probability.
With the accelerating developments in the field of quantum communication, there will be a need for sources of highly quantum single-photons. In addition to communication applications, the purity, brightness, and fidelity of a given single-photon source are intrinsically linked to the success rate and scalability of a range of photonic technologies in quantum computing, metrology, memory, and cryptography. Further, quantum repeater architectures for maintaining quantum information over long distances will become crucial. In these schemes, end-to-end entanglement is generated by establishing entanglement between the ends of several elementary segments, followed by successive entanglement-swapping operations to increase the entanglement distance until it spans the transmission channel. The most widely studied proposal for the practical implementation of a quantum repeater is the Duan-Lukin-Cirac-Zoller (DLCZ) protocol. This consists of off-resonant Raman excitation by a write pulse, which induces a spin-wave excitation in an atomic ensemble and emits a Stokes photon. At a later time, this spin-wave may be read with a high-power resonant pulse, resulting in the emission of an anti-Stokes photon into a well-defined spatial mode. The Stokes photon may be used for entanglement with another ensemble, while the anti-Stokes may be read out for an entanglement-swapping operation. Notably, in the DLCZ protocol, the atomic ensemble serves as both the quantum memory and a heralded single-photon source. Using atomic ensembles for single-photon sources enables the production of highly pure, indistinguishable photons with minimal spectral broadening; however, the generation rate remains a challenge. In the case of DLCZ, the Raman-scattering step is highly probabilistic, reducing the anti-Stokes generation rate considerably. Furthermore, DLCZ requires operation in the low-excitation-probability regime to avoid multiphoton noise contributions. Additionally, the profile of the induced spin wave is suboptimal for readout. To compensate for these drawbacks, in this thesis we report the experimental realization of a variant of DLCZ that leverages collectively enhanced superradiant (SR) emission. Superradiant emission is characterized by intense bursts of photons emitted in a shorter amount of time than independent atomic state decay. By switching to a resonant excitation and optimizing the write profile, the induced spin-wave is primed for readout, thus increasing retrieval efficiency and the level of quantum correlation. We report data for both the DLCZ and SR schemes under similar optical conditions and compare the two. At high write power, the SR protocol exhibits conditional readout probabilities as high as $\sim$1.2\%, compared to $\sim$0.6\% for the DLCZ protocol under the same conditions. We also analyze the temporal distribution of anti-Stokes emission and find a degree of maintenance of the spin-wave profile, even in the anti-Stokes direction.
We report an investigation to establish the physical mechanisms responsible for decoherence in the generation of photon pairs from atomic ensembles, via the protocol of Duan et al. for long-distance quantum communication [Nature (London) 414, 413 (2001)] and present the experimental techniques necessary to properly control the process. We develop a theory to model in detail the decoherence process in experiments with magneto-optical traps. The inhomogeneous broadening of the ground state by the trap magnetic field is identified as the principal mechanism for decoherence. The theory includes the Zeeman structure of the atomic hyperfine levels used in the experiment, and the polarization of both excitation fields and detected photons. In conjunction with our theoretical analysis, we report a series of measurements to characterize and control the coherence time in our experimental setup. We use copropagating stimulated Raman spectroscopy to access directly the ground-state energy distribution of the ensemble. These spectroscopic measurements allow us to switch off the trap magnetic field in a controlled way, optimizing the repetition rate for single-photon measurements. With the magnetic field off, we then measure nonclassical correlations for pairs of photons generated by the ensemble as a function of the storage time of the single collective atomic excitation. We report coherence times longer than $10\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{s}$, corresponding to an increase of two orders of magnitude compared to previous results in cold ensembles. The coherence time is now two orders of magnitude longer than the duration of the excitation pulses. The comparison between these experimental results and the theory shows good agreement. Finally, we employ our theory to devise ways to improve the experiment by optical pumping to specific initial states.
Coherent control of collective spontaneous emission in an extended atomic ensemble resonantly interacting with single-photon wave packets is analyzed. A scheme for coherent manipulation of collective atomic states is developed such that superradiant states of the atomic system can be converted into subradiant ones and vice versa. Possible applications of such a scheme for optical quantum-state storage and single-photon wave packet shaping are discussed. It is shown that also in the absence of inhomogeneous broadening of the resonant line, single-photon wave packets with arbitrary pulse shape may be recorded as a subradiant state and reconstructed even although the duration of the wave packets is larger than the superradiant lifetime. Specifically the applicability for storing time-bin qubits, which are used in quantum cryptography, is analyzed.
The distribution of entanglement between different parties enables quantum communication protocols, such as quantum key distribution or teleportation. Furthermore, control of entanglement between material systems is an essential capability for scalable architectures. This talk will focus on the experimental gen-eration of such entanglement in different setups, in the regime of single photons or in the regime of continuous variables. The first part will review experiments done recently in the single excitation regime. First, by following the seminal paper of Duan, Lukin, Cirac and Zoller (DLCZ) [1], entanglement between single collective excitations stored in two re-mote atomic ensembles can be generated. In the DLCZ protocol, entanglement is created in a probabilistic but heralded way from quantum interference in the measurement process. The detection of a photon from one or the other atomic ensemble in an indistinguishable fashion results in an entangled state with one collective spin excitation shared coherently [2]. This entanglement has been used for the initial implementation of functional quantum nodes for polarization en-