This dissertation is devoted to the development of quantum memories for light. Quantum memory is an important part of future long-distance quantum fiber networks and quantum processing. Quantum memory is required to be efficient, multimode, noise free, scalable, and should be able to provide long storage times for practical applications in quantum communications and beyond. Here I concentrate on solving particular problems of different quantum protocols and find ways for extending the performance of memories and adding new capabilities. I theoretically show that an array of whispering-gallery resonators is capable of being an efficient and noise-free optical memory with an adjustable storage time. The potential for on-chip realization at room temperature makes the scheme attractive for easy implementation. The effect of Raman scattering in echo memory was evaluated experimentally and theoretically. The noise performance of gradient echo memory in Λ configuration proves, that the developed theory is in a good agreement with an experiment. I proposed a mechanism for extending the bandwidth of impedance-matched memories via a white-light cavity effect. The introduced additional dispersion compensates a bandwidth decrease induced by the cavity and hence increases the spectral zone of impedance matching. Theoretically the scheme allows to increase the bandwidth of high efficient storage (>90%) several times without adding extra noise. Finally, I have proposed an architecture of quantum random-access memory for time-bin photons. The architecture consists from a memory unit and a strongly coupled three-level atom. Both of them are placed in their own cavities, which are coupled to each other. The protocol allows to achieve quantum addressing of quantum information stored in the memory with only a single control unit. This is useful for numerous tasks in quantum machine learning.
We have analyzed an efficient integration of the multi-qubit echo quantum memory into the quantum computer scheme on the atomic resonant ensembles in quantum electrodynamics cavity. Here, one atomic ensemble with controllable inhomogeneous broadening is used for the quantum memory node and other atomic ensembles characterized by the homogeneous broadening of the resonant line are used as processing nodes. We have found optimal conditions for efficient integration of multi-qubit quantum memory modified for this analyzed physical scheme and we have determined a specified shape of the self temporal modes providing a perfect reversible transfer of the photon qubits between the quantum memory node and arbitrary processing nodes. The obtained results open the way for realization of full-scale solid state quantum computing based on using the efficient multi-qubit quantum memory.
A random access memory, or RAM, is a device that, when interrogated, returns the content of a memory location in a memory array. A quantum RAM, or qRAM, allows one to access superpositions of memory sites, which may contain either quantum or classical information. RAMs and qRAMs with
n-bit addresses can access
2n memory sites. Any design for a RAM or qRAM then requires
O(2n) two-bit logic gates. At first sight this requirement might seem to make large scale quantum versions of such devices impractical, due to the difficulty of constructing and operating coherent devices with large numbers of quantum logic gates. Here we analyze two different RAM architectures (the conventional fanout and the ``bucket brigade'') and propose some proof-of-principle implementations, which show that, in principle, only
O(n) two-qubit physical interactions need take place during each qRAM call. That is, although a qRAM needs
O(2n) quantum logic gates, only
O(n) need to be activated during a memory call. The resulting decrease in resources could give rise to the construction of large qRAMs that could operate without the need for extensive quantum error correction.
A random access memory (RAM) uses n bits to randomly address N=2(n) distinct memory cells. A quantum random access memory (QRAM) uses n qubits to address any quantum superposition of N memory cells. We present an architecture that exponentially reduces the requirements for a memory call: O(logN) switches need be thrown instead of the N used in conventional (classical or quantum) RAM designs. This yields a more robust QRAM algorithm, as it in general requires entanglement among exponentially less gates, and leads to an exponential decrease in the power needed for addressing. A quantum optical implementation is presented.
We investigate a scheme of atomic quantum memory to store photonic qubits in cavity QED. This is motivated on the recent observation that the quantum-state swapping between a single-photon pulse and a Lambda-type atom trapped in a cavity is ideally realized via scattering for some specific case in the strong coupling cavity regime [T. W. Chen, C. K. Law, and P. T. Leung, Phys. Rev. A 69, 063810 (2004)]. We derive a simple formula for calculating the fidelity of this atom-photon swapping for quantum memory. We further propose a feasible method which implements conditionally the quantum memory operation with the fidelity of almost unity even if the atom-photon coupling is not so strong. This method can also be applied to store a photonic entanglement in spatially separated atomic quantum memories.
Random-access quantum memories may offer computational advantages for quantum computers and networks. In this paper, we advance arrays of solid-state quantum memories toward their usage as random-access quantum memory. We perform quantum storage of path and time-bin qubits implemented with weak coherent states at the single-photon level, in an array of ten temporally multiplexed memory cells with controllable addressing. The qubits can be stored in arbitrary combinations of memory cells, from which they are read out on demand. We find average fidelities of 95 − 2 + 2 % for path qubits and 91 − 2 + 2 % for time-bin qubits. The measured fidelities violate the classical bounds for both encodings and for all ten cells. We also sequentially store a time-bin qubit in two different memory cells, maintain both qubits simultaneously in the array, and perform a collective readout. The individual control paired with high storage fidelity represents a significant advance toward a solid-state random-access quantum memory for quantum repeaters and photonic quantum processors.