Communication in quantum networks suffers notoriously from photon loss. Resulting errors can be mitigated with a suitable measurement herald at the receiving node. However, waiting for a herald and communicating the measurement result back to the sender in a repeat-until-success strategy makes the protocol slow and prone to errors from false heralds such as detector dark counts. Here, we implement an entanglement herald at the sending node by employing a cascaded two-photon emission of a single atom into two optical fiber cavities: the polarization of one photon is entangled with the spin of the atom, and the second photon heralds entanglement generation. We show that heralding improves the atom-photon entanglement in-fiber efficiency and fidelity to 68(3)% and 87(2)%, respectively. We highlight the potential of our source for noise-limited long-distance quantum communication by extending the range for constant fidelity or, alternatively, increasing the fidelity for a given distance.
Communication in quantum networks suffers notoriously from photon loss. Resulting errors can be mitigated with a suitable measurement herald at the receiving node. However, waiting for a herald and communicating the measurement result back to the sender in a repeat-until-success strategy makes the protocol slow and prone to errors from false heralds such as detector dark counts. Here, we implement an entanglement herald at the sending node by employing a cascaded two-photon emission of a single atom into two optical fiber cavities: the polarization of one photon is entangled with the spin of the atom, and the second photon heralds entanglement generation. We show that heralding improves the atom-photon entanglement in-fiber efficiency and fidelity to 68(3)% and 87(2)%, respectively. We highlight the potential of our source for noise-limited long-distance quantum communication by extending the range for constant fidelity or, alternatively, increasing the fidelity for a given distance.
Distributing entangled states over potentially long distances provides a key resource for many protocols in quantum communication and quantum cryptography. Ideally, this should be implemented in a heralded manner. Starting with four single-photon states, we cascade two single-photon path-entangled states, coded in orthogonal polarizations, to distribute and herald polarization entanglement in a single quantum repeater link architecture. By tuning the input states to minimize (local) losses, the theoretically achievable fidelity to the target state without postselection approaches 1, while sacrificing heralding rates. We achieve a fidelity to the target state of over 95% after postselection, providing a benchmark for the experimental control and allowing a first demonstration of a device-independent quantum key distribution architecture capable of operation over relevant distances. We show that the fidelity of the heralded state without postselection scales predictably and also identify various practical challenges and error sources specific to this architecture, and model their effects on the generated state. While our experiment uses probabilistic photon-pair sources based on spontaneous parametric downconversion, many of these problems are also relevant for variants employing deterministic photon sources.
Quantum communication attempts to harness the unique rules of quantum mechanics to perform communication tasks that are difficult or impossible using classical rules. To realize these benefits, information must be carried on quantum systems. Photons make excellent carriers because they interact very little with the environment, move quickly, and can naturally store quantum information in their polarization. However, it is notoriously difficult to detect a single photon without destroying it. Standard detectors simply absorb the photon, losing the quantum information. This is a critical outstanding problem in quantum communication, as advanced protocols need to know exactly when a photon has arrived at a receiver after transmission through the atmosphere or an optical fibre before performing further quantum-information-processing tasks. Certifying a photon’s presence is of particular interest in tests of Bell’s inequalities, which have only recently been performed without loopholes arising from photon loss, and in device-independent quantum cryptography, which relies on such Bell tests for security. \n \nIn this thesis, I first present work on directly reducing losses in a successful loophole-free Bell test. This is an extremely difficult task that cannot be extended for long-distance communication. Therefore I then focus on ways to circumvent loss by detecting photons without destroying them while preserving their quantum information. First I analyze theoretically a way to herald photons using only linear-optical elements (beam splitters and phase shifters) and extra ancilla photons. Similar but older methods have been demonstrated experimentally by other groups, and my improvements will help future advanced quantum communication protocols. \n \nThe main experiment in this thesis certifies the presence of a photon in a rather simple way: split the photon into two using a nonlinear optical crystal, then detect one of the pair to herald the other. I show in this first proof-of-principle experiment that photonic qubit precertification indeed preserves qubit states, with up to (92.3 ± 0.6)% fidelity and rates of 1100 events per hour. With reductions in detector dark counts, precertification could outperform direct transmission, even with extremely lossy fibre links. \n \nFinally, I present two sources of photons based on nonlinearities in optical fibres. One of the limitations of the photon splitting scheme for heralding is the low success probability due to the very low likelihood of splitting a photon in two. In these fibre photon sources I investigate increasing the splitting likelihood in four-wave mixing through advanced materials and fibre designs. I use polarization-maintaining fibres to generate entangled photon pairs as a prerequisite to precertification, with (92.2 ± 0.2)% fidelity to a maximally-entangled state. Then I show that one type of highly nonlinear chalcogenide glass, never before used for photon pair generation, could outperform standard nonlinear crystals by two orders of magnitude, with calculated conversion efficiency up to 10^-3. To approach the single photon regime, I generate photon pairs in chalcogenide microwires with pump powers as low as 480 nW and verify their timing correlations. \n \nThese advances demonstrate the capability of nondestructive precertification of photons to allow advanced quantum communications protocols even over long distance, and could lead to the first implementations of fully device-independent quantum cryptography.
Quantum repeater is one of the important building blocks for long distance quantum communication network. The previous quantum repeaters based on atomic ensembles and linear optical elements can only be performed with a maximal success probability of 1/2 during the entanglement creation and entanglement swapping procedures. Meanwhile, the polarization noise during the entanglement distribution process is harmful to the entangled channel created. Here we introduce a general interface between a polarized photon and an atomic ensemble trapped in a single-sided optical cavity, and with which we propose a high-efficiency quantum repeater protocol in which the robust entanglement distribution is accomplished by the stable spatial-temporal entanglement and it can in principle create the deterministic entanglement between neighboring atomic ensembles in a heralded way as a result of cavity quantum electrodynamics. Meanwhile, the simplified parity-check gate makes the entanglement swapping be completed with unity efficiency, other than 1/2 with linear optics. We detail the performance of our protocol with current experimental parameters and show its robustness to the imperfections, i.e., detuning and coupling variation, involved in the reflection process. These good features make it a useful building block in long distance quantum communication.
Abstract Quantum networks promise to provide the infrastructure for many disruptive applications, such as efficient long-distance quantum communication and distributed quantum computing1, 2. Central to these networks is the ability to distribute entanglement between distant nodes using photonic channels. Initially developed for quantum teleportation3, 4 and loophole-free tests of Bell’s inequality5, 6, recently, entanglement distribution has also been achieved over telecom fibres and analysed retrospectively7, 8. Yet, to fully use entanglement over long-distance quantum network links it is mandatory to know it is available at the nodes before the entangled state decays. Here we demonstrate heralded entanglement between two independently trapped single rubidium atoms generated over fibre links with a length up to 33 km. For this, we generate atom–photon entanglement in two nodes located in buildings 400 m line-of-sight apart and to overcome high-attenuation losses in the fibres convert the photons to telecom wavelength using polarization-preserving quantum frequency conversion9. The long fibres guide the photons to a Bell-state measurement setup in which a successful photonic projection measurement heralds the entanglement of the atoms10. Our results show the feasibility of entanglement distribution over telecom fibre links useful, for example, for device-independent quantum key distribution11–13 and quantum repeater protocols. The presented work represents an important step towards the realization of large-scale quantum network links.
Long-distance quantum communication requires quantum repeaters to overcome photon loss in optical fibers. Here we demonstrate a repeater node with two memory atoms in an optical cavity. Both atoms are individually and repeatedly entangled with photons that are distributed until each communication partner has independently received one of them. An atomic Bell-state measurement followed by classical communication serves to establish a key. We demonstrate scaling advantage of the key rate, increase the effective attenuation length by a factor of 2, and beat the error-rate threshold of 11% for unconditionally secure communication, the corner stones for repeater-based quantum networks.
Long-distance entanglement distribution is the key task for quantum networks, enabling applications such as secure communication and distributed quantum computing. Here we report on novel developments extending the reach for sharing entanglement between a single 87Rb atom and a single photon over long optical fibers. To maintain a high fidelity during the long flight times through such fibers, the coherence time of the single atom is prolonged to 7 ms by applying a long-lived qubit encoding. In addition, the attenuation in the fibers is minimized by converting the photon's wavelength to the telecom S-Band via polarization-preserving quantum frequency conversion. This enables to observe entanglement between the atomic quantum memory and the emitted photon after passing 101 km of optical fiber with a fidelity better than 70.8$\pm$2.4%. The fidelity, however, is no longer reduced due to loss of coherence of the atom or photon but in the current setup rather due to detector dark counts, showing the suitability of our platform to realize city-to-city scale quantum network links.