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Research in Optical Sciences

Revival of Silenced Echo for Optical Quantum Memories: Efficiency and Noise Level

M Bonarota, Vianney Damon, T. Chanelière, Jean-Louis Le Gouët, M. F. Pascual Winter

Published Jan 1, 2012• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present a novel quantum memory protocol inspired by the two photon echo that overcomes the main drawbacks of the latter, namely, contamination of the retrieval pulse by spontaneous emission and free induction decay. It makes use of two rephasing pulses instead of one, the second is intended to send the atoms back to the fundamental state so that the echo is emitted in a non-inverted medium. The emission of the echo after the first pulse is prevented by unfulfillment of the spatial phase matching condition. Experimental maximum efficiency is found to be limited to 30% for 0:5 at. % Tm3+:YAG, mainly because of finite coherence lifetime. We have performed a preliminary analysis of noise, finding a significant reduction of spontaneous emission noise in the retrieval mode. However, further improvements are to be done since the signal to noise ratio is still close to one.

DOI
10.1364/qim.2012.qw2a.6

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Письма в Журнал экспериментальной и теоретической физики•Jun 15, 2023•1 citation
We present a novel quantum memory protocol inspired by the two photon echo that overcomes the main drawbacks of the latter, namely, contamination of the retrieval pulse by spontaneous emission and free induction decay. It makes use of two rephasing pulses instead of one, the second is intended to send the atoms back to the fundamental state so that the echo is emitted in a non-inverted medium. The emission of the echo after the first pulse is prevented by unfulfillment of the spatial phase matching condition. Experimental maximum efficiency is found to be limited to 30% for 0:5 at. % Tm3+:YAG, mainly because of finite coherence lifetime. We have performed a preliminary analysis of noise, finding a significant reduction of spontaneous emission noise in the retrieval mode. However, further improvements are to be done since the signal to noise ratio is still close to one.
We propose an original quantum memory protocol. It belongs to the class of rephasing processes and is closely related to two-pulse photon echo. It is known that the strong population inversion produced by the rephasing pulse prevents the plain two-pulse photon echo from serving as a quantum memory scheme. Indeed, gain and spontaneous emission generate prohibitive noise. A second π-pulse can be used to simultaneously reverse the atomic phase and bring the atoms back into the ground state. Then a secondary echo is radiated from a non-inverted medium, avoiding contamination by gain and spontaneous emission noise. However, one must kill the primary echo, in order to preserve all the information for the secondary signal. In the present work, spatial phase mismatching is used to silence the standard two-pulse echo. An experimental demonstration is presented.
Abstract Photon echo is a fundamental tool for the manipulation of electromagnetic fields. Unavoidable spontaneous emission noise is generated in this process due to the strong rephasing pulse, which limits the achievable signal-to-noise ratio and represents a fundamental obstacle towards their applications in the quantum regime. Here we propose a noiseless photon-echo protocol based on a four-level atomic system. We implement this protocol in a Eu3+:Y2SiO5 crystal to serve as an optical quantum memory. A storage fidelity of 0.952 ± 0.018 is obtained for time-bin qubits encoded with single-photon-level coherent pulses, which is far beyond the maximal fidelity achievable using the classical measure-and-prepare strategy. In this work, the demonstrated noiseless photon-echo quantum memory features spin-wave storage, easy operation and high storage fidelity, which should be easily extended to other physical systems.
Abstract Photon echo is a fundamental tool for the manipulation of electromagnetic fields. Unavoidable spontaneous emission noise is generated in this process due to the strong rephasing pulse, which limits the achievable signal-to-noise ratio and represents a fundamental obstacle towards their applications in the quantum regime. Here we propose a noiseless photon-echo protocol based on a four-level atomic system. We implement this protocol in a Eu3+:Y2SiO5 crystal to serve as an optical quantum memory. A storage fidelity of 0.952 ± 0.018 is obtained for time-bin qubits encoded with single-photon-level coherent pulses, which is far beyond the maximal fidelity achievable using the classical measure-and-prepare strategy. In this work, the demonstrated noiseless photon-echo quantum memory features spin-wave storage, easy operation and high storage fidelity, which should be easily extended to other physical systems.
A quantum memory protocol has been implemented on the basis of the revival of silenced echo (ROSE) in the 167Er3+:Y2SiO5 crystal at the telecommunication wavelength for input light fields with a small number of photons. An efficiency of storage of 44% has been reached at a storage time of 40 μs. The input pulse contains ~340 photons on average, the reconstructed echo signal includes ~150 photons, and the signal-to-noise ratio is 4. It has been shown that the main source of noise is the spontaneous emission of atoms remaining in the excited state because the parameters of two rephasing pulses are imperfect. Methods of increasing the signal-to-noise ratio for the implementation of the efficient quantum memory for single-photon fields have been discussed.
Over the last two decades, quantum memories have been intensively studied for potential applications of quantum repeaters in quantum networks. Various protocols have also been developed. To satisfy no noise echoes caused by spontaneous emission processes, a conventional two-pulse photon-echo scheme has been modified. The resulting methods include double-rephasing, ac Stark, dc Stark, controlled echo, and atomic frequency comb methods. In these methods, the main purpose of modification is to remove any chance of a population residual on the excited state during the rephasing process. Here, we investigate a typical Gaussian rephasing pulse-based double-rephasing photon-echo scheme. For a complete understanding of the coherence leakage by the Gaussian pulse itself, ensemble atoms are thoroughly investigated for all temporal components of the Gaussian pulse, whose maximum echo efficiency is 26% in amplitude, which is unacceptable for quantum memory applications.
An optical quantum memory protocol has been implemented on the basis of the revival of silenced echo at the telecommunication wavelength for signal light fields with a small number of photons. To this end, a long-lived (1 s) absorption line has been initialized and the orthogonal geometry of the propagation of the signal and rephasing fields has been chosen. An efficiency of revival of (17 ± 1)% has been reached for the orthogonal polarization components of a signal pulse at a storage time of 60 μs. The input pulse contains ~38 photons on average, the revived echo signal includes ~6 photons, and the signal-to-noise ratio is 1.3.