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Nature Photonics

Access to long-term optical memories using photon echoes retrieved from semiconductor spins

Lukas Langer, S. V. Poltavtsev, I. A. Yugova, M. Salewski, Dmitri R. Yakovlev, G. Karczewski, T. Wójtowicz, Ilya A. Akimov, M. Bayer

Published Sep 26, 2014• 85 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1038/nphoton.2014.219

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We use spontaneous (two-pulse) and stimulated (three-pulse) photon echoes for studying the coherent evolution of optically excited ensemble of trions which are localized in semiconductor CdTe/CdMgTe quantum well. Application of transverse magnetic field leads to the Larmor precession of the resident electron spins, which shuffles optically induced polarization between optically accessible and inaccessible states. This results in several spectacular phenomena. First, magnetic field induces oscillations of spontaneous photon echo amplitude. Second, in three-pulse excitation scheme, the photon echo decay is extended by several orders of magnitude. In this study, short-lived optical excitation which is created by the first pulse is coherently transferred into a long-lived electron spin state using the second optical pulse. This coherent spin state of electron ensemble persists much longer than any optical excitation in the system, preserving information on initial optical field, which can be retrieved as a photon echo by means of third optical pulse.
The possibility to store optical information is important for classical and quantum communication. Atoms or ions as well as color centers in crystals offer suitable two-level systems for absorbing incoming photons. To obtain a reliable transfer of coherence, strong enough light-matter interaction is required, which may enforce use of ensembles of absorbers, but has the disadvantage of unavoidable inhomogeneities leading to fast dephasing. This obstacle can be overcome by echo techniques that allow recovery of the information as long as the coherence is preserved. Albeit semiconductor quantum structures appear appealing for information storage due to the large oscillator strength of optical transitions, inhomogeneity typically is even more pronounced for them and most importantly the optical coherence is limited to nanoseconds or shorter. Here we show that by transferring the information to electron spins the storage times for the optical coherence can be extended by orders of magnitude up to the spin relaxation time. From the spin reservoir it can be retrieved on purpose by inducing a stimulated photon echo. We demonstrate this for an n-doped CdTe/(Cd,Mg)Te quantum well for which the storage time thereby could be increased by more than three orders of magnitude from the picosecond-range up to tens of nanoseconds.
A photonic quantum memory that can store multiple qubits and later recall any randomly chosen subset is essential for large-scale quantum networking and computing. This capability, similar to random-access memory in classical computers, has been difficult to achieve due to the lack of a versatile random-access mechanism and the limited multi-mode storage capacity of existing quantum memory protocols. One promising route uses photon-echo protocols, which apply optical rephasing pulses to selectively read out frequency-multiplexed photonic qubits within a broadened optical transition. Here we advance a photon-echo-based quantum memory protocol using linearly swept adiabatic rephasing pulses, which imprint phase shifts to suppress unwanted echoes. Using the optical transitions of a 171Yb3+:Y2SiO5 crystal, we demonstrate storage and retrieval of multiple complex spectro-temporal photonic modes and achieve random-access memory across eight distinct spectral modes. We show enhanced mode-mapping versatility while substantially lowering the required rephasing pulse intensity, providing a more efficient and reliable approach for high-fidelity qubit storage and retrieval. Scalable quantum networks require memories that store photonic qubits while allowing selective access to individual states, a capability not currently available. A chirped-pulse phase-encoding approach provides random access to spectro-temporal-multiplexed information, enabling storage and retrieval across eight spectral modes with lower rephasing pulse intensity.