Cavity-assisted photon scattering (CAPS) is a powerful mechanism for realizing strong interactions between the internal states of stationary qubits and flying photons, underpinning a broad range of hybrid atom-photon protocols including remote entanglement generation and heralded atom-photon gates. Recently, the motional quantum state has emerged as an important building block for quantum information processing with atomic qubits, both as a coherently controllable degree of freedom and as a fundamental error channel through undesired spin-motion coupling. For the resonant-coupling regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics relevant to CAPS operations, however, the analytical formulation of spin-motion-photon coupling has so far remained elusive. Here, we develop a complete analytical framework for CAPS that incorporates the coherent interaction between atomic motion and a reflected photon by extending scattering theory to include the motional degree of freedom. The resulting compact operator-based input-output relation applies uniformly across various cavity geometries, spin-dependent trapping potentials, and nonidentical multiple spins. As an exemplary application, we use the framework to elucidate how atomic motion affects CAPS-based atom-photon gates, identifying the parameter regimes that suppress motion-induced errors. Our framework provides a theoretical foundation both for mitigating motional errors in CAPS operations and for deliberately exploiting motion-photon interaction at the atom-photon interface.
Cavity-assisted photon scattering (CAPS) is a powerful mechanism for realizing strong interactions between the internal states of stationary qubits and flying photons, underpinning a broad range of hybrid atom-photon protocols including remote entanglement generation and heralded atom-photon gates. Recently, the motional quantum state has emerged as an important building block for quantum information processing with atomic qubits, both as a coherently controllable degree of freedom and as a fundamental error channel through undesired spin-motion coupling. For the resonant-coupling regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics relevant to CAPS operations, however, the analytical formulation of spin-motion-photon coupling has so far remained elusive. Here, we develop a complete analytical framework for CAPS that incorporates the coherent interaction between atomic motion and a reflected photon by extending scattering theory to include the motional degree of freedom. The resulting compact operator-based input-output relation applies uniformly across various cavity geometries, spin-dependent trapping potentials, and nonidentical multiple spins. As an exemplary application, we use the framework to elucidate how atomic motion affects CAPS-based atom-photon gates, identifying the parameter regimes that suppress motion-induced errors. Our framework provides a theoretical foundation both for mitigating motional errors in CAPS operations and for deliberately exploiting motion-photon interaction at the atom-photon interface.
We propose a time- and wavelength-multiplexed remote atom-atom entanglement generation protocol based on cavity-assisted photon scattering (CAPS). This is designed to achieve a high rate and high fidelity with robustness to operational imperfections, parameter fluctuations, and auxiliary time costs, such as percent-level photon impurity, timing and cavity parameter jitter, and atom shuttling time costs. We benchmark this protocol using comprehensive analytical and numerical modeling of the atom-cavity dynamics, including state-dependent pulse-delay effects, photon temporal impurity, atom-cavity system parameter fluctuations, and crosstalk among atoms through a shared cavity mode. With realistic atom-cavity system performance, we predict 2 × 10 5 s − 1 successful atom-atom Bell pair generation even without in-cavity qubit reset, substantially enhanced from two-photon-interference-based protocols, at a predicted heralded fidelity of 0.999. We further show that the predicted rate scales further by the use of wavelength multiplexing while maintaining the fidelity.
A major trend within the field of cavity QED is to boost the interaction strength between the cavity field and the atomic internal degrees of freedom of the trapped atom by decreasing the mode volume of the cavity. In such systems, it is natural to achieve strong atom-cavity coupling, where the coherent interaction strength exceeds the cavity linewidth, while the linewidth exceeds the atomic trap frequency. While most work focuses on coupling of photons to the internal degrees of freedom, additional rich dynamics can occur by considering the atomic motional degree of freedom as well. In particular, we show that such a system is a natural candidate to explore an interesting regime of quantum optomechanics, where the zero-point atomic motion yields a cavity frequency shift larger than its linewidth (so-called single-photon optomechanical strong coupling), but simultaneously where the motional frequency cannot be resolved by the cavity. We show that this regime can result in a number of remarkable phenomena, such as strong entanglement between the atomic wave function and the scattering properties of single incident photons, or an anomalous mechanism where the atomic motion can significantly heat up due to single-photon scattering, even if the atom is trapped tightly within the Lamb-Dicke limit.
We theoretically investigate the generation of heralded entanglement between two identical atoms via cavity-assisted photon scattering in two different configurations, namely, either both atoms confined in the same cavity or trapped into locally separated ones. Our protocols are given by a very simple and elegant single-step process, the key mechanism of which is a controlled-phase-flip gate implemented by impinging a single photon on single-sided cavities. In particular, when the atoms are localized in remote cavities, we introduce a single-step parallel quantum circuit instead of the serial process extensively adopted in the literature. We also show that such parallel circuit can be straightforwardly applied to entangle two macroscopic clouds of atoms. Both protocols proposed here predict a high entanglement degree with a success probability close to unity for state-of-the-art parameters. Among other applications, our proposal and its extension to multiple atom-cavity systems step toward a suitable route for quantum networking, in particular for quantum state transfer, quantum teleportation, and nonlocal quantum memory.
Single electron spin in a semiconductor quantum dot (QD) and single photon wavepacket propagating in an optical waveguide are investigated as carriers of quantum bit (qubit) for information processing. Cavity quantum electrodynamics of the coupled system composed of charged QD, microcavity and waveguide provides a quantum interface for the interplay of stationary spin qubits and flying photon qubits via cavity assisted optical control. This interface forms the basis for a wide range of essential functions of a quantum network, including transferring, swapping, and entangling qubits at distributed quantum nodes as well as a deterministic source and an efficient detector of a single photon wavepacket with arbitrarily specified shape. The cavity assisted optical process also made possible ultrafast initialization and QND readout of the spin qubit in QD. In addition, the strong optical nonlinearity of dot-cavity-waveguide coupled system enables phase gate and entanglement operation for flying single photon qubits in waveguides. The coherence of the electron spin is the wellspring of these quantum applications being investigated. At low temperature and strong magnetic field, the dominant cause of electron spin decoherence is the coupling with the interacting lattice nuclear spins. We present a quantum solution to the coupled dynamics of the electron with the nuclear spin bath. The decoherence is treated in terms of quantum entanglement of the electron with the nuclear pair-flip excitations driven by the various nuclear interactions. A novel nuclear interaction, mediated by virtue spin-flips of the single electron, plays an important role in single spin free-induction decay (FID). The spin echo not only refocuses the dephasing by inhomogeneous broadening in ensemble dynamics but also eliminates the decoherence by electron-mediated nuclear interaction. Thus, the decoherence times for single spin FID and ensemble spin echo are significantly different. The quantum theory of decoherence also leads to a method of coherence recovery of the electron by disentanglement, realized through maneuvering the nuclear bath evolution by control of the electron spin-flip. The studies form the basis to outline the construction of a solid-state quantum network for scalable and distributed processing of quantum information
Abstract Single atoms coupled to a cavity offer unique opportunities as quantum optomechanical devices because of their small mass and strong interaction with light. A particular regime of interest in optomechanics is that of ‘single-photon strong coupling’, where motional displacements on the order of the zero-point uncertainty are sufficient to shift the cavity resonance frequency by more than its linewidth. In many cavity QED platforms, however, this is unfeasible due to the large cavity linewidth. Here, we propose an alternative route in such systems, which instead relies on the coupling of atomic motion to the much narrower cavity-dressed atomic resonance frequency. We discuss and optimize the conditions in which the scattering properties of single photons from the atom-cavity system become highly entangled with the atomic motional wave function. We also analyze the prominent observable features of this optomechanical strong coupling, which include a per-photon motional heating that is significantly larger than the single-photon recoil energy, as well as mechanically-induced oscillations in time of the second-order correlation function of the emitted light. This physics should be realizable in current experimental setups, such as trapped atoms coupled to photonic crystal cavities, and more broadly opens the door to realizing qualitatively different phenomena beyond what has been observed in optomechanical systems thus far.
Cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) in the strong-coupling regime provides the opportunity to monitor and control the dynamics of a simple quantum system. A single Cesium atom interacts strongly with single-photon fields in the mode of a high-finesse optical cavity. When the resulting coherent coupling rate dominates dissipation in the system, strong coupling is realized and the system displays distinctively quantum behavior. The coupling between atomic internal states and the quantized cavity field allows for diverse protocols in quantum state preparation, quantum communication, and quantum logic. However, the atom's external or motional state must also be taken into account. My research develops cavity QED in the limit where the coherent atom-field coupling dominates the atomic kinetic energy and thus significantly affects the atomic center-of-mass motion. In this regime, the interaction of the atom with the cavity field provides both a means of controlling atomic motion and a signal for detecting that motion in real time with high signal-to-noise. The sensing capability of the ``atom-cavity microscope" is exploited to trap single atoms with single-photon fields and to monitor their orbits in real time as they are bound in the cavity. Such real-time position sensing is the basis for a detailed strategy and ongoing experiment to actively stabilize select aspects of an atom's motion within the cavity. As the cavity-enabled position measurement approaches the standard quantum limit, this work begins to realize a quantum servo for atomic position and to address questions of optimal state estimation and state preparation. In combination with other progress in cavity QED, it furthers the goal of controlled atom-field interactions for quantum information science.