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arXiv:1407.7510 · Physical Review A

Photon-photon gate via the interaction between two collective Rydberg excitations

Mohammadsadegh Khazali, Khabat Heshami, Christoph Simon

Published Mar 17, 2015• 54 citations
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Abstract

We propose a scheme for a deterministic controlled-phase gate between two photons that is based on the strong interaction between two stationary collective Rydberg excitations in an atomic ensemble outside the regime of Rydberg blockade. The distance-dependent character of the interaction causes both a momentum displacement of the collective excitations and unwanted entanglement between them. We show that these effects can be overcome by swapping the collective excitations in space and by optimizing the geometry, resulting in a photon-photon gate with high fidelity and efficiency.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.91.030301

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We propose a scheme for a deterministic controlled-phase gate between two photons that is based on the strong interaction between two stationary collective Rydberg excitations in an atomic ensemble outside the regime of Rydberg blockade. The distance-dependent character of the interaction causes both a momentum displacement of the collective excitations and unwanted entanglement between them. We show that these effects can be overcome by swapping the collective excitations in space and by optimizing the geometry, resulting in a photon-photon gate with high fidelity and efficiency.
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Quantum controlled-phase-flip (CPF) gate between a flying photon qubit and a stationary atomic qubit could allow the linking of distant computational nodes in a quantum network. Here we present a scheme to realize quantum CPF gate between a flying optical photon and an atomic ensemble based on cavity input-output process and Rydberg blockade. When a flying single-photon pulse is reflected off the cavity containing a Rydberg atomic ensemble, the dark resonance and Rydberg blockade induce a conditional phase shift for the photon pulse, thus we can achieve the CPF gate between the photon and the atomic ensemble. Assisted by Rydberg blockade interaction, our scheme works in the N-atoms strong-coupling regime and significantly relaxes the requirement of strong coupling of single atom to photon in the optical cavity.
We discuss electromagnetically induced transparency in a cold ensemble of atoms optically excited to the Rydberg states. Strong dipole-dipole or van der Waals interactions between the atomic Rydberg states translate into large nonlocal nonlinearities for a propagating probe field. In the case of weak quantum fields, this can be used to attain a conditional phase shift of π between pairs of single photons realizing a deterministic photonic phase gate. For stronger fields, long-range interactions between the atoms constrain the medium to behave as a collection of superatoms, each comprising a blockade volume that can accommodate at most one Rydberg excitation. The propagation of a probe field is affected by its two-photon correlations within the blockade distance, which are strongly damped due to low saturation threshold of the superatoms. Our calculations reproduce and interpret the results of recent experiments.
We propose an efficient free-space scheme to create single photons in a well-defined spatiotemporal mode. To that end, we first prepare a single source atom in an excited Rydberg state. The source atom interacts with a large ensemble of ground-state atoms via a laser-mediated dipole-dipole exchange interaction. Using an adiabatic passage with a chirped laser pulse, we produce a spatially extended spin wave of a single Rydberg excitation in the ensemble, accompanied by the transition of the source atom to another Rydberg state. The collective atomic excitation can then be converted to a propagating optical photon via a coherent coupling field. In contrast to previous approaches, our single-photon source does not rely on the strong coupling of a single emitter to a resonant cavity, nor does it require the heralding of collective excitation or complete Rydberg blockade of multiple excitations in the atomic ensemble.
We propose a scheme for realizing quantum repeaters with Rydberg-blockade-coupled atomic ensembles, based on a recently proposed collective encoding strategy. Rydberg-blockade-mediated two-qubit gates and efficient cooperative photon emission are employed to create ensemble-photon entanglement. Thanks to deterministic entanglement swapping operations via Rydberg-based two-qubit gates, and to the suppression of multiexcitation errors by the blockade effect, the entanglement distribution rate of the present scheme is higher by orders of magnitude than the rates achieved by other ensemble-based repeaters. We also show how to realize temporal multiplexing with this system, which offers an additional speedup in entanglement distribution.
Hybrid matter-photon entanglement is the building block for quantum networks. It is very favorable if the entanglement can be prepared with a high probability. In this Letter, we report the deterministic creation of entanglement between an atomic ensemble and a single photon by harnessing the Rydberg blockade. We design a scheme that creates entanglement between a single photon's temporal modes and the Rydberg levels that host a collective excitation, using a process of cyclical retrieving and patching. The hybrid entanglement is tested via retrieving the atomic excitation as a second photon and performing correlation measurements, which suggest an entanglement fidelity of 87.8%. Our source of matter-photon entanglement will enable the entangling of remote quantum memories with much higher efficiency.