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arXiv:1701.01852 · Laser & Photonics Review

Sustained photon pulse revivals from inhomogeneously broadened spin ensembles

Dmitry O. Krimer, Matthias Zens, Stefan Putz, Stefan Rotter

Published Oct 14, 2016• 17 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract A very promising recent trend in applied quantum physics is to combine the advantageous features of different quantum systems into what is called “hybrid quantum technology”. One of the key elements in this new field will have to be a quantum memory enabling to store quanta over extended periods of time. Systems that may fulfill the demands of such applications are comb‐shaped spin ensembles coupled to a cavity. Due to the decoherence induced by the inhomogeneous ensemble broadening, the storage time of these quantum memories is, however, still rather limited. Here we demonstrate how to overcome this problem by burning well‐placed holes into the spectral spin density leading to spectacular performance in the multimode regime. Specifically, we show how an initial excitation of the ensemble leads to the emission of more than a hundred well‐separated photon pulses with a decay rate significantly below the fundamental limit of the recently proposed “cavity protection effect”. image

DOI
10.1002/lpor.201600189

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Abstract A very promising recent trend in applied quantum physics is to combine the advantageous features of different quantum systems into what is called “hybrid quantum technology”. One of the key elements in this new field will have to be a quantum memory enabling to store quanta over extended periods of time. Systems that may fulfill the demands of such applications are comb‐shaped spin ensembles coupled to a cavity. Due to the decoherence induced by the inhomogeneous ensemble broadening, the storage time of these quantum memories is, however, still rather limited. Here we demonstrate how to overcome this problem by burning well‐placed holes into the spectral spin density leading to spectacular performance in the multimode regime. Specifically, we show how an initial excitation of the ensemble leads to the emission of more than a hundred well‐separated photon pulses with a decay rate significantly below the fundamental limit of the recently proposed “cavity protection effect”. image
Rabi oscillations with a decay time of 26.7 μs are observed in a system comprising the electron spins in a diamond nitrogen–vacancy centre and a superconducting microwave cavity. Such oscillations are achieved by engineering the spectral hole burning of the spin ensemble. Spectral hole burning, used in inhomogeneously broadened emitters, is a well-established optical1 technique, with applications from spectroscopy to slow light2 and frequency combs3. In microwave photonics4, electron spin ensembles5,6 are candidates for use as quantum memories7 with potentially long storage times8. Here, we demonstrate long-lived collective dark states9 by spectral hole burning in the microwave regime10. The coherence time in our hybrid quantum system (nitrogen–vacancy centres strongly coupled to a superconducting microwave cavity) becomes longer than both the ensemble's free-induction decay and the bare cavity dissipation rate. The hybrid quantum system thus performs better than its individual subcomponents. This opens the way for long-lived quantum multimode memories, solid-state microwave frequency combs, spin squeezed states11, optical-to-microwave quantum transducers12 and novel metamaterials13. Beyond these, new cavity quantum electrodynamics experiments will be possible where spin–spin interactions and many-body phenomena14 are directly accessible.
Inhomogeneously broadened spin ensembles play an important role in present-day implementation of hybrid quantum processing architectures. When coupled to a cavity, such an ensemble may serve as a multimode quantum memory for the cavity field, and by employing spin-refocusing techniques the quantum-memory time can be extended to the coherence time of individual spins in the ensemble. In this paper, we investigate such a memory protocol capable of storing an unknown cavity-field state, and we examine separately the various constituents of the protocol: the storage and readout part, the memory hold time with the spin ensemble and cavity field decoupled, and the parts employing spin-refocusing techniques. Using both analytical and numerical methods, we derive how the obtainable memory performance scales with various physical parameters.
For the last decade quantum memories have been intensively studied for potential applications to quantum information and communications using atomic and ionic ensembles. With the importance of a multimode storage capability in quantum memories, on-demand control of reversible inhomogeneous broadening of an optical medium has been broadly investigated recently. However, the photon storage time in these researches is still too short to apply for long-distance quantum communications. In this paper, we demonstrate new physics of spin population decay dependent ultralong photon storage method, where spin population decay time is several orders of magnitude longer than the conventional constraint of spin phase decay time.
Abstract We investigate the performance of inhomogeneously broadened spin ensembles as quantum memories under continuous dynamical decoupling. The role of the continuous driving field is twofold: firstly, it decouples individual spins from magnetic noise; secondly, and more importantly, it suppresses and reshapes the spectral inhomogeneity of spin ensembles. We show that a continuous driving field, which itself may also be inhomogeneous over the ensemble, can considerably enhance the decay of the tails of the inhomogeneous broadening distribution. This fact enables a spin-ensemble-based quantum memory to exploit the effect of cavity protection and achieve a much longer storage time. In particular, for a spin ensemble with a Lorentzian spectral distribution, our calculations demonstrate that continuous dynamical decoupling has the potential to improve its storage time by orders of magnitude for the state-of-the-art experimental parameters.
Spin ensemble based hybrid quantum systems suffer from a significant degree of decoherence resulting from the inhomogeneous broadening of the spin transition frequencies in the ensemble. We demonstrate that this strongly restrictive drawback can be overcome simply by burning two narrow spectral holes in the spin spectral density at judiciously chosen frequencies. Using this procedure we find an increase of the coherence time by more than an order of magnitude as compared to the case without hole burning. Our findings pave the way for the practical use of these hybrid quantum systems for the processing of quantum information.
We propose a multimode quantum memory protocol able to store the quantum state of the field in a microwave resonator into an ensemble of electronic spins. The stored information is protected against inhomogeneous broadening of the spin ensemble by spin-echo techniques resulting in memory times orders of magnitude longer than previously achieved. By calculating the evolution of the first and second moments of the spin-cavity system variables for current experimental parameters, we show that a memory based on nitrogen vacancy center spins in diamond can store a qubit encoded on the |0> and |1> Fock states of the field with 80% fidelity and outperform classical memory strategies for storage times ≤69 μs.