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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Quantum repeater architecture and NV-based node technology

Kae Nemoto, Michael Trupke, Simon J. Devitt, Ashley M. Stephens, Burkhard Scharfenberger, K. Buczak, Tobias Nöbauer, Jörg Schmiedmayer, William J. Munro

Published Oct 8, 2014• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present a quantum repeater architecture using nitrogen-vacancy (NV) diamond based quantum information devices. The NV-diamond based device consists of a single negatively charged NV (NV-) center and an optical cavity. The electron of the NV center is an interface to light to be used to distribute long-distance entanglement as well as entanglement bonds for cluster state operation at each nodes. The nuclear spin-1=2 of nitrogen 15 can be used as memory. Based on this device, A scheme with as small as 10 devices to a scalable architecture is constructed, showing the necessary node technology as well as the performance such quantum communication systems.

DOI
10.1117/12.2061182

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We present a quantum repeater architecture using nitrogen-vacancy (NV) diamond based quantum information devices. The NV-diamond based device consists of a single negatively charged NV (NV-) center and an optical cavity. The electron of the NV center is an interface to light to be used to distribute long-distance entanglement as well as entanglement bonds for cluster state operation at each nodes. The nuclear spin-1=2 of nitrogen 15 can be used as memory. Based on this device, A scheme with as small as 10 devices to a scalable architecture is constructed, showing the necessary node technology as well as the performance such quantum communication systems.
In this article we present a simple repeater scheme based on the negatively-charged nitrogen vacancy centre in diamond. Each repeater node is built from modules comprising an optical cavity containing a single NV(-), with one nuclear spin from (15)N as quantum memory. The module uses only deterministic processes and interactions to achieve high fidelity operations (>99%), and modules are connected by optical fiber. In the repeater node architecture, the processes between modules by photons can be in principle deterministic, however current limitations on optical components lead the processes to be probabilistic but heralded. Our resource-modest repeater architecture contains two modules at each node, and the repeater nodes are then connected by entangled photon pairs. We discuss the performance of such a quantum repeater network with modest resources and then incorporate more resource-intense strategies step by step. Our architecture should allow large-scale quantum information networks with existing or near future technology.
Quantum repeaters are essential for overcoming the exponential photon loss that limits entanglement generation over long distances in quantum networks. An absorption-emission-based quantum repeater exploits the fundamental light-matter interactions of a diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center---photon absorption and photon emission---to transfer a quantum state from an absorbed photon to an emitted photon, offering a scalable architecture that operates without photon interference between remote nodes. Here we demonstrate an absorption-emission-based quantum repeater node using a single NV center, realizing the complete single-node operation in which heralded photon-to-memory quantum state transfer, repeat-until-success (RUS) emission of a spin-entangled photon, and quantum teleportation of the memory state onto the emitted photon constitute the essential repeater operation. By characterizing the complete repeater operation as a quantum channel from the absorbed photon to the emitted photon via quantum process tomography, we obtain a process fidelity of 78%. This demonstration establishes the absorption-emission approach as a fundamental building block for scalable quantum repeater architectures and paves the way toward practical long-distance quantum networks.
In recent years, NV centers in diamond has attracted significant attention as a candidate for quantum information devices. The negatively charged NV center, in particular, has been intensely investigated [1-3]. NV- centers host both an electron spin qubit and a nitrogen nuclear spin, in our case a nuclear spin-1/2 of 15N is imbedded. The ground state of the electron spin qubit has a long coherence time and an optical transition at 637nm. The nuclear spins may be considered as a long-lived quantum memory, which has been experimentally demonstrated [2]. Because of these preferable quantum properties, NV centers have been considered as a good candidate for implementation of quantum information processing and there has been a number of theoretically propose designs for quantum information processing [3].
We present new quantum repeater architectures based on optical modules with NV diamond centers to highlight how physical properties of these optical modules change the operations, performance and limitations of the quantum repeater systems.We focus on two different approaches to construct optical modules, and see how the properties of modules propagate to the total system. The first approach to construct the optical module is to utilize the conditional refection dependent on the electron state of the single NV center in the cavity, and the other approach is to use absorption induced teleportation from an incoming photon to the nuclear spin of the NV center. To characterize a quantum repeater system, the processes and protocols associated with photons are important.As photons are not reliable as an information carrier, i.e. quantum manipulations associated with photons are not deterministic, and the protocols and manipulations rely on post-selection to keep the fidelity of the quantum information.Post-selection is essential in quantum communications based on photons to maintain the fidelity of the communication, however it restricts the architecture of the system to be tolerant to probabilistic gates. This factor is cost intensive and is the key for the architectures to be scalable.We show that the details of how the scalability of the architectures can be affected by physical parameters of the modules.
Single defect centers in diamond have emerged as a powerful platform for quantum optics experiments and quantum information processing tasks. Connecting spatially separated nodes via optical photons into a quantum network will enable distributed quantum computing and long-range quantum communication. Initial experiments on trapped atoms and ions as well as defects in diamond have demonstrated entanglement between two nodes over several meters. To realize multi-node networks, additional quantum bit systems that store quantum states while new entanglement links are established are highly desirable. Such memories allow for entanglement distillation, purification and quantum repeater protocols that extend the size, speed and distance of the network. However, to be effective, the memory must be robust against the entanglement generation protocol, which typically must be repeated many times. Here we evaluate the prospects of using carbon nuclear spins in diamond as quantum memories that are compatible with quantum networks based on single nitrogen vacancy (NV) defects in diamond. We present a theoretical framework to describe the dephasing of the nuclear spins under repeated generation of NV spin-photon entanglement and show that quantum states can be stored during hundreds of repetitions using typical experimental coupling parameters. This result demonstrates that nuclear spins with weak hyperfine couplings are promising quantum memories for quantum networks.
Programmability is increasingly central in emerging quantum network software stacks, yet the node-internal controller-to-hardware interface for quantum repeater devices remains under-specified. We introduce the idea of an instruction-set architecture (ISA) for controller-driven programmability of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center quantum repeater nodes. Each node consists of an optically interfaced electron spin acting as a data qubit and a long-lived nuclear-spin register acting as a control program. We formalize two modes of programmability: (i) deterministic register control, where the nuclear register is initialized in a basis state to select a specific operation on the data qubit; and (ii) coherent register control, where the register is prepared in superposition, enabling coherent combinations of operations beyond classical programmability. Network protocols are expressed as controller-issued instruction vectors, which we illustrate through a compact realization of the BBPSSW purification protocol. We further show that coherent register control enables interferometric diagnostics such as fidelity witnessing and calibration, providing tools unavailable in classical programmability. Finally, we discuss scalability to multi-electron and multi-nuclear spin architectures and connection to Linear combination of unitaries (LCU) and Kraus formulation.