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arXiv:1312.6846 · Optics Letters

Beat note stabilization of mode-locked lasers for quantum information processing

Rajibul Islam, Wesley C. Campbell, Taeyoung Choi, Susan Clark, C. W. S. Conover, Shantanu Debnath, E.E. Edwards, B. Anne Fields, David Hayes, David Hucul, I. V. Inlek, K. G. Johnson, S. É. Korenblit, A. Lee, K. W. Lee, T. Andrew Manning, Dzmitry Matsukevich, Jonathan Mizrahi, Qudsia Sara Quraishi, Crystal Senko, James L. Smith, Christopher R. Monroe

Published May 23, 2014• 34 citations

Abstract

We stabilize a chosen radio frequency beat note between two optical fields derived from the same mode-locked laser pulse train in order to coherently manipulate quantum information. This scheme does not require access or active stabilization of the laser repetition rate. We implement and characterize this external lock, in the context of two-photon stimulated Raman transitions between the hyperfine ground states of trapped 171Yb(+) quantum bits.

DOI: 10.1364/ol.39.003238

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We stabilize a chosen radio frequency beat note between two optical fields derived from the same mode-locked laser pulse train in order to coherently manipulate quantum information. This scheme does not require access or active stabilization of the laser repetition rate. We implement and characterize this external lock, in the context of two-photon stimulated Raman transitions between the hyperfine ground states of trapped 171Yb(+) quantum bits.

Summary form only given. Here, we demonstrate the first scheme to generate pulsed quantum frequency combs without the need for an external laser. We constructed a laser cavity (Fig. 1a) around a 4-port integrated micro-ring resonator, featuring narrow bandpass filters to select a single resonance, an optical gain component (erbium-doped fiber amplifier), and a mode-locking element (an intensity modulator). By setting the intensity modulation frequency to the fundamental repetition rate of the cavity (determined by the external cavity length), we achieved mode-locked pulsed operation (Fig. 1b), exciting a pulsed two-photon comb. Driving the intensity modulator at multiples of the fundamental repetition rate (upwards of 4x) also resulted in stable mode-locking (Fig. 1c), significant as this enables an increase of the photon pair generation rate without sacrificing its coincidence-to-accidental ratio (CAR). We characterized the photon statistics as a function of the average ring input power (see Fig. 1d), achieving a maximum CAR of 110 that decreases with increasing power and increasing coincidence rates. Autocorrelation measurements confirmed the purity of the generated state (pure single-frequency modes, even at multiples of the repetition rate), confirming that the resonance was excited over its entire bandwidth, and obtained a heralded anti-bunching dip of 0.245<;0.5 as expected of a source operating in the single-photon regime.

The authors have used an electromagnetically induced transparency resonance in rubidium as a dispersive reference to lock the relative frequency of two lasers to the atomic ground-state hyperfine splitting. The beat frequency between the two lasers directly generates a microwave signal at 3.036GHz (Rb85) or 6.835GHz (Rb87). High bandwidth (600kHz) feedback was achieved with only low-frequency (10MHz) electronics using the frequency modulation sideband method. The spectral width of the microwave beat frequency was reduced to less than 1kHz. The technique offers a convenient and low-cost method suitable for many topical two-frequency experiments, including coherent population trapping, slow light, lasing without inversion, and Raman sideband cooling.

In order to control the state of a two-level quantum system (e.g. the spin state of an ion qubit), optical frequency combs perform a two-photon stimulated Raman process through stimulated absorption from one comb tooth and stimulated emission into another comb tooth. If the two-level energy gap is an integer multiple of the repetition rate of the laser, resonant Rabi oscillations are excited. When these latter have a frequency close to the qubit’s transition one, a strongly anharmonic phase-locked cycle may exist on the Bloch sphere, which generates a sub-harmonic series of very narrow, equally spaced, spectral lines. If the repetition rate of an optical frequency comb is appropriately tuned to these latter (up to the average carrier envelope frequency), a highly resonant dynamical regime of the two-level system should be reached where the Raman stimulated absorption and emission processes would occur for any pair of adjacent comb teeth.