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arXiv:0906.4388 · Physical Review A

Nonclassical photon streams using rephased amplified spontaneous emission

Patrick M. Ledingham, William R. Naylor, Jevon J. Longdell, Sarah E. Beavan, Matthew J. Sellars

Published Jan 4, 2010• 44 citations
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Abstract

We present a fully quantum mechanical treatment of optically rephased photon echoes. These echoes exhibit noise due to amplified spontaneous emission; however, this noise can be seen as a consequence of the entanglement between the atoms and the output light. With a rephasing pulse one can get an ``echo'' of the amplified spontaneous emission, leading to light with nonclassical correlations at points separated in time, which is of interest in the context of building wide bandwith quantum repeaters. We also suggest a wideband version of DLCZ protocol based on the same ideas.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.81.012301

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We present a fully quantum mechanical treatment of optically rephased photon echoes. These echoes exhibit noise due to amplified spontaneous emission; however, this noise can be seen as a consequence of the entanglement between the atoms and the output light. With a rephasing pulse one can get an ``echo'' of the amplified spontaneous emission, leading to light with nonclassical correlations at points separated in time, which is of interest in the context of building wide bandwith quantum repeaters. We also suggest a wideband version of DLCZ protocol based on the same ideas.
Amplified spontaneous emission is a common noise source in active optical systems, it is generally seen as being an incoherent process. Here we excite an ensemble of rare earth ion dopants in a solid with a π pulse, resulting in amplified spontaneous emission. The application of a second π pulse leads to a coherent echo of the amplified spontaneous emission that is correlated in both amplitude and phase. For small optical thicknesses, we see evidence that the amplified spontaneous emission and its echo are entangled.
This thesis explores the concept of photon-echo-rephasing of the spontaneous emission from an ensemble of atoms. This generates entangled photon pairs, with intermediate storage and on-demand recall of one photon of the pair. In the first instance, this has applications as a single photon source. A more advanced application is as a building-block of a quantum repeater protocol, which is essential for expanding the range and versatility of current quantum communication links. The system used for this experimental demonstration of rephased amplified spontaneous emission (RASE) is a rare-earth ion doped crystal; Pr:YSO. Rare earth ion crystals are promising candidates for practical quantum information processing devices, largely because they possess long coherence times on both optical and hyperfine transitions. To achieve the rephasing, a novel pulse sequence utilizing four atomic levels is developed and characterized. This pulse sequence allows for the single-photon signals to be resolved spatially, spectrally, and temporally from any background coherent emission associated with the bright driving fields. It is seen that spontaneous emission can indeed be rephased using this sequence, however the degree of correlation measured was not sufficient to prove a non-classical correlation. This is attributed to an insufficient signal to noise ratio. The sources of background noise are identified, and strategies proposed to enable improved correlation measurements in future RASE experiments. The most significant noise contribution is spontaneous emission that differs only slightly in frequency from the signal. Single-photon counters are used for the RASE detection; appropriate for discrete-variable quantum repeater applications, but lacking any frequency resolution. Therefore auxiliary frequency filtering is required. Narrow-band (~kHz) filtering is performed in the RASE experiment using spectral hole-burning properties of the Pr:YSO sample itself. Furthermore, a concept for a dynamic filter is developed and tested. This uses a combination of hole-burning and Stark-shifting. The demonstration involves switching between two MHz-wide transmission windows, 10.2 MHz apart. Each spectral region is switched from an absorption of ~0.5 dB to 60 dB in a matter of micro-seconds. This technique will be particularly useful in future RASE experiments for tunable frequency discrimination. An additional noise source that is found to fundamentally limit the fidelity of RASE in this system is due to uncorrelated spontaneous emission at the same frequency as the RASE signal. This emission is a direct consequence of the low branching ratio of the optical transition. A means of avoiding this emission is proposed; namely to place the sample in a cavity to effectively enhance the branching ratio. Aside from the quality of the photon correlations, another important aspect of RASE is the storage time. Methods are discussed for achieving long memory times (~1 s) in the Pr:YSO system, using transitions between ground state hyperfine levels. In general this thesis presents a series of experiments that lay the foundation for generating entanglement between photonic and collective-atomic states, through the measurement and rephasing of spontaneous emission from an ensemble of atoms.
Amplified spontaneous emission is usually treated as an incoherent noise process. Recent theoretical and experimental work using rephasing optical pulses has shown that rephased amplified spontaneous emission (RASE) is a potential source of wide bandwidth time-delayed entanglement. Due to poor echo efficiency the plain RASE protocol does not in theory achieve perfect entanglement. Experiments done to date show a very small amount of entanglement at best. Here we show that RASE can, in principle, produce perfect multimode time-delayed two mode squeezing when the active medium is placed inside a Q-switched cavity.
In this paper we report the first demonstration of "rephased amplified spontaneous emission" (RASE) with photon-counting detection. This protocol provides an all-in-one photon-pair source and quantum-memory that has applications as a quantum repeater node. The RASE protocol is temporally multimode, and in this demonstration the photon echo was generated in a way that is spatially multimode and includes intermediate storage between two potentially long-lived spin states. A correlation between spontaneous emission and its photon echo was observed, using an ensemble of Pr(3+) ions doped into a Y2SiO5 crystal. Alterations that would allow for the measurement of nonclassical correlations are identified. These should generally apply for future experiments in rare-earth ion crystals, which are promising systems for implementing highly-multiplexed quantum repeater operations.
This thesis investigates an entangled light source with an in-built quantum memory based on the protocol of rephased amplified spontaneous emission (RASE). RASE has promising applications as a building-block of a quantum repeater: a device essential for extending the range of current quantum communication links. To be useful RASE must be able to produce high fidelity non-classical light with high efficiency, and be able to store multimode entanglement for long times. This thesis characterises the RASE source and determines to what degree these requirements can be met. The experimental RASE demonstration was conducted in a rare-earth ion doped crystal. Rare-earth ions provide a particularly promising platform for developing quantum technologies as they possess long coherence times on both the optical and hyperfine transitions. In the RASE protocol an inverted ensemble of two-level atoms amplifies the vacuum fluctuations resulting in amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). This results in entanglement between the output optical field and the collective modes of the amplifying ensemble. The collective atomic state dephases due to the inhomogeneous broadening of the ensemble but this can be rephased using photon echo techniques. When the ensemble rephases, a second optical field, the rephased amplified spontaneous emission (RASE), is emitted and is entangled with the ASE. In this thesis, a modified four-level rephasing scheme is used that allows the single photon signals to be spectrally resolved from any coherent background emission associated with the bright driving fields. In addition, four-level RASE incorporates storage on the long-lived hyperfine ground states. Two experiments are described in this thesis. First, a free-space four-level RASE demonstration using continuous-variable detection. In this experiment the different sources of noise were characterised and low noise operation was shown to be possible. Entanglement of the ASE and RASE was confirmed by violating the inseparability criterion with 98.6% confidence. In addition, entanglement was demonstrated after storage of the collective atomic state on the spin states and RASE was shown to be temporally multimode, with almost perfect distinguishability between two temporal modes demonstrated. The degree of entanglement between the ASE and RASE was limited by the rephasing efficiency, which saturated at 3%. It was determined that distortion of the rephasing pulses as they propagate through the optically thick ensemble was the probable cause of the low efficiency. The second experiment was a preliminary cavity-enhanced RASE demonstration. Theoretically perfect rephasing efficiency can be obtained by placing the crystal in an impedance-matched optical cavity. The initial cavity design showed encouraging evidence of an enhancement in the rephasing efficiency, with a 4-fold improvement over the free-space experiment. Improvements to the cavity design were proposed to allow a further increase in the rephasing efficiency of RASE. In summary, this thesis provides an extensive characterisation of an entangled light source with an in-built quantum memory based on rephasing spontaneous emission from an ensemble of ions. Importantly, the RASE scheme allows generation and storage of entanglement in a single protocol, which holds great promise for the development of integrated quantum networks.
The production of single photons using rephased amplified spontaneous emission is examined. This process produces single photons on demand with high efficiency by detecting the spontaneous emission from an atomic ensemble, then applying a population-inverting pulse to rephase the ensemble and produce a photon echo of the spontaneous emission events. The theoretical limits on the efficiency of the production are determined for several variants of the scheme. For an ensemble of uniform optical density, generating the initial spontaneous emission and its echo using transitions of different strengths is shown to produce single photons at 70% efficiency, limited by reabsorption. Tailoring the spatial and spectral density of the atomic ensemble is then shown to prevent reabsorption of the rephased photon, resulting in emission efficiency near unity.