Currently, epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) materials have become important for controlling the propagation of light and enhancing by several orders of magnitude the Kerr and other nonlinearities. Given this advance it is important to examine the quantum electrodynamic processes and information tasks near ENZ materials. We study the entanglement between two two-level systems near ENZ materials and compare our results with the case where the ENZ material is replaced by a metal. It is shown that with ENZ materials substantial entanglement can be achieved over larger distances than for metal films. We show that this entanglement over large distances is due to the fact that one can not only have large emission rates but also large energy transmission rates at the epsilon-near-zero wavelength. This establishes the superiority of ENZ materials for studying processes specifically important for quantum information tasks.
Currently, epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) materials have become important for controlling the propagation of light and enhancing by several orders of magnitude the Kerr and other nonlinearities. Given this advance it is important to examine the quantum electrodynamic processes and information tasks near ENZ materials. We study the entanglement between two two-level systems near ENZ materials and compare our results with the case where the ENZ material is replaced by a metal. It is shown that with ENZ materials substantial entanglement can be achieved over larger distances than for metal films. We show that this entanglement over large distances is due to the fact that one can not only have large emission rates but also large energy transmission rates at the epsilon-near-zero wavelength. This establishes the superiority of ENZ materials for studying processes specifically important for quantum information tasks.
The resonance energy transfer and entanglement between two-level quantum emitters are typically limited to sub-wavelength distances due to the inherently short-range nature of the dipole-dipole interactions. Moreover, the entanglement of quantum systems is hard to preserve for a long time period due to decoherence and dephasing mainly caused by radiative and nonradiative losses. In this work, we outperform the aforementioned limitations by presenting efficient long-range inter-emitter entanglement and large enhancement of resonance energy transfer between two optical qubits mediated by epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) and other plasmonic waveguide types, such as V-shaped grooves and cylindrical nanorods. More importantly, we explicitly demonstrate that the ENZ waveguide resonant energy transfer and entanglement performance drastically outperforms the other waveguide systems. Only the excited ENZ mode has an infinite phase velocity combined with a strong and homogeneous electric field distribution, which leads to a giant energy transfer and efficient entanglement independent of the emitters' separation distances and nanoscale positions in the ENZ nanowaveguide, an advantageous feature that can potentially accommodate multi-qubit entanglement. Moreover, the transient entanglement can be further improved and become almost independent of the detrimental decoherence effect when an optically active (gain) medium is embedded inside the ENZ waveguide. We also present that efficient steady-state entanglement can be achieved by using a coherent external pumping scheme. Finally, we report a practical way to detect the steady-state entanglement by computing the second-order correlation function. The presented findings stress the importance of plasmonic ENZ waveguides in the design of the envisioned on-chip quantum communication and information processing plasmonic nanodevices.
Two emitters can be entangled by manipulating them through optical fields within a photonic cavity. However, maintaining entanglement for a long time is challenging due to the decoherence of the entangled qubits, primarily caused by cavity loss and atomic decay. Here, we found the entangled dark state between two emitters mediated by a dielectric cavity within epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) materials, ensuring entanglement maintenance over an extended period. To obtain the entangled dark state, we derived an effective model with degenerate mode modulation. In the dielectric cavities within ENZ materials, the decay rate of emitters can be regarded as 0, which is the key to achieving the entangled dark state. Meanwhile, the dark state immune to cavity loss exists when two emitters are in symmetric positions in the dielectric cavity. Additionally, by adjusting the emitters to specific asymmetric positions, it is possible to achieve transient entanglement with higher concurrence. By overcoming the decoherence of the entangled qubits, this study demonstrates stable, long-term entanglement with ENZ materials, holding significant importance for applications such as nanodevice design for quantum communication and quantum information processing.
Realization of an on-chip quantum network is a major goal in the field of integrated quantum photonics. A typical network scalable on-chip demands optical integration of single photon sources, optical circuitry and detectors for routing and processing of quantum information. Current solutions either notoriously experience considerable decoherence or suffer from extended footprint dimensions limiting their on-chip scaling. Here we propose and numerically demonstrate a robust on-chip quantum network based on an epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) material, whose dielectric function has the real part close to zero. We show that ENZ materials strongly protect quantum information against decoherence and losses during its propagation in the dense network. As an example, we model a feasible implementation of an ENZ network and demonstrate that quantum information can be reliably sent across a titanium nitride grid with a coherence length of 434 nm, operating at room temperature, which is more than 40 times larger than state-of-the-art plasmonic analogs. Our results can, therefore, enable practical realization of large multi-node quantum photonic networks and circuits on-a-chip.
The authors demonstrate here the nonlinear optical response of epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) nanostructures at the single-photon level using fully nonperturbative quantum theory of open systems with indium tin oxide materials and Kerr-type nonlinearity. Closed-form analytical results obtained for spherical nanoparticles are numerically validated and extended to geometries that can be fabricated using state-of-the-art electron-beam lithography, establishing a rigorous benchmark for understanding quantum nonlinear effects in ENZ nanostructures with optical losses. These results are important to emerging quantum technology, including on-chip single-photon nondemolition detection, sensing, and spectroscopy.
Multiqubit entanglement is extremely important to perform truly secure quantum optical communication and computing operations. However, the efficient generation of long-range entanglement over extended time periods between multiple qubits randomly distributed in a photonic system remains an outstanding challenge. This constraint is mainly due to the detrimental effects of decoherence and dephasing. To alleviate this issue, we present engineered epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) nanostructures that can maximize the coherence of light–matter interactions at room temperature. We investigate a practical ENZ plasmonic waveguide system, which simultaneously achieves multiqubit entanglement in elongated distances, extended time periods, and, even more importantly, independent of the emitters' positions. More specifically, we present efficient transient entanglement between three and four optical qubits mediated by ENZ with results that can be easily generalized to an arbitrary number of emitters. The entanglement between multiple qubits is characterized by computing the negativity metric applied to the proposed nanophotonic ENZ configuration. The ENZ response is found to be substantially advantageous to boost the coherence between multiple emitters compared to alternative plasmonic waveguide schemes. Finally, the super-radiance collective emission response at the ENZ resonance is utilized to design a high fidelity two-qubit quantum phase gate that can be used in various emerging quantum computing applications.
Multi-qubit entanglement is of paramount importance to perform truly secure quantum optical communication operations. In this work, we present efficient long-range entanglement mediated by plasmonic waveguides operating at their cut-off frequency, where they exhibit an effective epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) response. Only the excited ENZ mode at plasmonic waveguides has a strong and homogeneous electric field distribution compared to different modes excited at groove and rod waveguides, resulting in an efficient two- and multi-qubit entanglement that can persist over extended time periods and long distances. Efficient multipartite entanglement from three equidistantly arranged two-level quantum emitters (qubits) inside the ENZ waveguide is also demonstrated by using three different multi-qubit entanglement criterions, i.e., pairwise concurrence, negativity, and genuine multipartite entanglement. The findings of this work stress the importance of ENZ plasmonic waveguides as an ideal nanophotonic platform to support efficient quantum optical effects.