It may one day be possible to use arrays of quantum dots driven by ultrafast laser pulses to carry out quantum information processing. The article reviews recent experimental progress in the area of coherent optical control of single dots and outlines a plan for further research.
Major improvements have been made on semiconductor quantum dot light sources recently and now they can be seen as a serious candidate for near-future scalable photonic quantum information processing experiments. The three key parameters of these photon sources for such applications have been pushed to extreme values: almost unity single-photon purity and photon indistinguishability, and high brightness. In this paper, we review the progress achieved recently on quantum-dot-based single-photon sources. We also review some quantum information experiments where entanglement processes are achieved using semiconductor quantum dots.
For the past fifteen years, single semiconductor quantum dots, often referred to as solid-state artificial atoms, have been at the forefront of various research direction lines for experimental quantum information science, in particular in the development of practical sources of quantum states of light. Here we review the research to date, on the tailoring of the emission properties from single quantum dots producing single photons, indistinguishable single photons and entangled photon pairs. Finally, the progress and future prospects for applications of single dots in quantum information processing is considered.
An all optical implementation of quantum information processing with semiconductor macroatoms is proposed. Our quantum hardware consists of an array of quantum dots and the computational degrees of freedom are energy-selected interband optical transitions. The quantum-computing strategy exploits exciton-exciton interactions driven by ultrafast multicolor laser pulses. Contrary to existing proposals based on charge excitations, our approach does not require time-dependent electric fields, thus allowing for a subpicosecond, decoherence-free, operation time scale in realistic semiconductor nanostructures.
Single spins in semiconductor quantum dots form a promising platform for solid-state quantum information processing. The spin-up and spin-down states of a single electron or hole, trapped inside a quantum dot, can represent a single qubit with a reasonably long decoherence time. The spin qubit can be optically coupled to excited (charged exciton) states that are also trapped in the quantum dot, which provides a mechanism to quickly initialize, manipulate and measure the spin state with optical pulses, and to interface between a stationary matter qubit and a 'flying' photonic qubit for quantum communication and distributed quantum information processing. The interaction of the spin qubit with light may be enhanced by placing the quantum dot inside a monolithic microcavity. An entire system, consisting of a two-dimensional array of quantum dots and a planar microcavity, may plausibly be constructed by modern semiconductor nano-fabrication technology and could offer a path toward chip-sized scalable quantum repeaters and quantum computers. This article reviews the recent experimental developments in optical control of single quantum dot spins for quantum information processing. We highlight demonstrations of a complete set of all-optical single-qubit operations on a single quantum dot spin: initialization, an arbitrary SU(2) gate, and measurement. We review the decoherence and dephasing mechanisms due to hyperfine interaction with the nuclear-spin bath, and show how the single-qubit operations can be combined to perform spin echo sequences that extend the qubit decoherence from a few nanoseconds to several microseconds, more than 5 orders of magnitude longer than the single-qubit gate time. Two-qubit coupling is discussed, both within a single chip by means of exchange coupling of nearby spins and optically induced geometric phases, as well as over longer-distances. Long-distance spin-spin entanglement can be generated if each spin can emit a photon that is entangled with the spin, and these photons are then interfered. We review recent work demonstrating entanglement between a stationary spin qubit and a flying photonic qubit. These experiments utilize the polarization- and frequency-dependent spontaneous emission from the lowest charged exciton state to single spin Zeeman sublevels.