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arXiv:1511.00025 · Physical Review A

High teleportation rates using cold-atom-ensemble-based quantum repeaters with Rydberg blockade

Neal Solmeyer, Xiao Li, Qudsia Sara Quraishi

Published Apr 1, 2016• 11 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present a simplified version of a repeater protocol in a cold neutral-atom ensemble with Rydberg excitations optimized for two-node entanglement generation and describe a protocol for quantum teleportation. Our proposal draws from previous proposals [B. Zhao et al., Phys. Rev. A 81, 052329 (2010); Y. Han et al., Phys. Rev. A 81, 052311 (2010)] that described efficient and robust protocols for long-distance entanglement with many nodes. Using realistic experimental values, we predict an entanglement generation rate of $\ensuremath{\sim}25\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\mathrm{Hz}$ and a teleportation rate of $\ensuremath{\sim}5\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\mathrm{Hz}$. Our predicted rates match the current state-of-the-art experiments for entanglement generation and teleportation between quantum memories. With improved efficiencies we predict entanglement generation and teleportation rates of $\ensuremath{\sim}7.8$ and $\ensuremath{\sim}3.6$ kHz, respectively, representing a two-order-of-magnitude improvement over the currently realized values. Cold-atom ensembles with Rydberg excitations are promising candidates for repeater nodes because collective effects in the ensemble can be used to deterministically generate a long-lived ground-state memory which may be efficiently mapped onto a directionally emitted single photon.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.93.042301

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We present a simplified version of a repeater protocol in a cold neutral-atom ensemble with Rydberg excitations optimized for two-node entanglement generation and describe a protocol for quantum teleportation. Our proposal draws from previous proposals [B. Zhao et al., Phys. Rev. A 81, 052329 (2010); Y. Han et al., Phys. Rev. A 81, 052311 (2010)] that described efficient and robust protocols for long-distance entanglement with many nodes. Using realistic experimental values, we predict an entanglement generation rate of \ensuremath∼25Hz\ensuremath{\sim}25\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\mathrm{Hz}\ensuremath∼25Hz and a teleportation rate of \ensuremath∼5Hz\ensuremath{\sim}5\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\mathrm{Hz}\ensuremath∼5Hz. Our predicted rates match the current state-of-the-art experiments for entanglement generation and teleportation between quantum memories. With improved efficiencies we predict entanglement generation and teleportation rates of \ensuremath∼7.8\ensuremath{\sim}7.8\ensuremath∼7.8 and \ensuremath∼3.6\ensuremath{\sim}3.6\ensuremath∼3.6 kHz, respectively, representing a two-order-of-magnitude improvement over the currently realized values. Cold-atom ensembles with Rydberg excitations are promising candidates for repeater nodes because collective effects in the ensemble can be used to deterministically generate a long-lived ground-state memory which may be efficiently mapped onto a directionally emitted single photon.
We propose an efficient quantum repeater architecture with mesoscopic atomic ensembles, where the Rydberg blockade is employed for deterministic local entanglement generation, entanglement swapping, and entanglement purification. Compared to a conventional atomic-ensemble-based quantum repeater, the entanglement distribution rate is improved by up to two orders of magnitude with the help of the deterministic Rydberg gate. This quantum repeater scheme is robust and fast, and thus opens up a way for practical long-distance quantum communication.
Single photons are the best carriers of quantum information for long-distance transmission. Nevertheless, maximal achievable distance is limited by the exponential decay of photons as a function of link length. The protocol of quantum repeater provides a promising solution by replacing direction transmission with segmented entanglement distribution and entanglement connection via swapping. The quantum repeater necessitates a key element of quantum memory for making efficient interconnections. An atomic ensemble is very suitable for this purpose due to the collective enhanced interaction. Single photons are stored as collective excitations in an atomic ensemble. Thus a comprehensive study of the physics relating to collective excitations is crucially important for improving the quantum memory performance and its reachable applications in quantum repeater and quantum network. In this article, we review our experimental work on cold atomic ensembles in recent years, focusing on the coherent manipulation of collective excitations. We first briefly introduce the general concept of collective excitations and the preparation process through spontaneous Raman scattering, and we review our experimental work on extending the coherence time, such as suppressing motional dephasing by increasing the spin-wave wavelength, by confining atoms with a three-dimensional optical lattice. Afterwards, we discuss about the retrieval process of collective excitations and review our experiments on using a ring-cavity enhanced setup to improve the retrieval efficiency. The coherent qubit operation in a quantum memory is very useful for enabling new functionalities for a quantum network, in a subsequent section, we thus review our work on developing Raman-based coherent operations for single excitations. Afterwards, we mention our experiments on creating a pair of atom-photon entanglement by interfering two modes of a collective excitation. Improving the entanglement preparation efficiency is crucially important, and Rydberg-based interaction provides a promising solution. Our experimental work in this direction is also reviewed. Additionally, as an application in coherent manipulation with collective excitations, we show several experiments on using excitations in remote atomic memories and demonstrating basic functionality of quantum repeater and quantum network. In short, significant progress has been made in the coherent manipulation of single collective excitations in cold atomic ensembles, and further improvement will be accelerated by the Rydberg-enabled interactions; practical applications in quantum repeater and quantum network is foreseeable in the near future.
Quantum communication aims at generating and distributing qubits between distant sites, in order to implement quantum information protocols, such as quantum key distribution, quantum teleportation and quantum processing. For many quantum protocols, and especially for quantum repeaters, which make quantum communication over long distances much more efficient, storage and/or emission of photonic states is necessary and represents a crucial step towards the realisation of a quantum network. An outstanding challenge of quantum communication is to implement quantum memories for photonic qubits, combining long storage time with high fidelity between the input and output states, and good efficiency. Moreover, to be compatible with quantum network applications, such as quantum repeaters, these memories have to enable heralded storage and on-demand read-out. Cold atomic ensembles hold promise for satisfying both these prerequisites, and are therefore a good candidate as storage medium, offering a compromise between different benchmarks. We are setting up an experiment intended to map polarisation qubits onto an optically pumped cold atomic ensemble of rubidium serving as our quantum memory device. In a first development, our quantum memory device will be operated in the single photon emission regime so as to implement, together with an entangled photon-pair source based on guided-wave optics, the quantum teleportation scheme.
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.
Single neutral atoms in optical tweezer arrays offer a promising platform for high-fidelity quantum computing at local nodes. Nonetheless, creating entanglement between remote nodes in a distributed quantum network remains challenging due to inherently weak atom-light coupling. Here, we design a distributed quantum network architecture in which cold atomic ensembles with strong atom-light interactions act as quantum antennas, interfacing single-atom qubits with flying photons to enable high-efficiency atom-photon entanglement generation -- analogous to the role of antennas in classical communication. Using realistic experimental parameters, we estimate an efficiency of η≃0.548η\simeq 0.548η≃0.548 for generating atom-photon entanglement, a probability of PE≃6%P_{E} \simeq 6 \%PE​≃6% for generating atom-atom entanglement, and a remote entanglement generation rate of $16.6 $ kHz. This performance not only surpasses that of state-of-the-art cavity-based or high-numerical-aperture-lens-based architectures but also offers notable advantages in simplicity, tunability, and experimental accessibility. Our scheme also integrates a long-lived quantum memory, providing a storage advantage for quantum repeater design. By leveraging the complementary strengths of single-atom qubits for local operations and cold atomic ensembles for networking, this approach paves the way for scalable distributed quantum computing and sensing.
In the last few years there has been a lot of interest in quantum repeater protocols using only atomic ensembles and linear optics. Here we show that the local generation of high-fidelity entangled pairs of atomic excitations, in combination with the use of two-photon detections for long-distance entanglement generation, permits the implementation of a very attractive quantum repeater protocol. Such a repeater is robust with respect to phase fluctuations in the transmission channels, and at the same time achieves higher entanglement generation rates than other protocols using the same ingredients. We propose an efficient method of generating high-fidelity entangled pairs locally, based on the partial readout of the ensemble-based memories. We also discuss the experimental implementation of the proposed protocol.