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Science

A single-photon gate

Ian S. Osborne

Published Jul 5, 2018• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum Optics A long-standing goal in optics is to produce a solid-state alloptical transistor, in which the transmission of light can be controlled by a single photon that acts as a gate or switch. Sun et al. used a solid-state system comprising a quantum dot embedded in a photonic crystal cavity to show that transmission through the cavity can be controlled with a single photon. The single photon is used to manipulate the occupation of electronic energy levels within the quantum dot, which in turn changes its optical properties. With the gate open, about 28 photons can get through the cavity on average, thus demonstrating single-photon switching and the gain for an optical transistor. Science , this issue p. [57][1] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aat3581

DOI
10.1126/science.361.6397.38-f

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Quantum Optics
A long-standing goal in optics is to produce a solid-state alloptical transistor, in which the transmission of light can be controlled by a single photon that acts as a gate or switch. Sun et al. used a solid-state system comprising a quantum dot embedded in a photonic crystal cavity to show that transmission through the cavity can be controlled with a single photon. The single photon is used to manipulate the occupation of electronic energy levels within the quantum dot, which in turn changes its optical properties. With the gate open, about 28 photons can get through the cavity on average, thus demonstrating single-photon switching and the gain for an optical transistor.
Science , this issue p. 57
Single-photon switches and transistors generate strong photon-photon interactions that are essential for quantum circuits and networks. However, the deterministic control of an optical signal with a single photon requires strong interactions with a quantum memory, which has been challenging to achieve in a solid-state platform. We demonstrate a single-photon switch and transistor enabled by a solid-state quantum memory. Our device consists of a semiconductor spin qubit strongly coupled to a nanophotonic cavity. The spin qubit enables a single 63-picosecond gate photon to switch a signal field containing up to an average of 27.7 photons before the internal state of the device resets. Our results show that semiconductor nanophotonic devices can produce strong and controlled photon-photon interactions that could enable high-bandwidth photonic quantum information processing.
The realization of an all-optical transistor, in which one "gate" photon controls a "source" light beam, is a long-standing goal in optics. By stopping a light pulse in an atomic ensemble contained inside an optical resonator, we realized a device in which one stored gate photon controls the resonator transmission of subsequently applied source photons. A weak gate pulse induces bimodal transmission distribution, corresponding to zero and one gate photons. One stored gate photon produces fivefold source attenuation and can be retrieved from the atomic ensemble after switching more than one source photon. Without retrieval, one stored gate photon can switch several hundred source photons. With improved storage and retrieval efficiency, our work may enable various new applications, including photonic quantum gates and deterministic multiphoton entanglement.
A single two-level system constitutes an extremely non-linear optical medium, where the interaction with a first single photon modifies the transmission probability for a second photon. The main difficulty to implement a single photon switch using this property is to ensure that a gate single photon will interact with the quantum emitter with a near-unity probability. In the solid state, all-optical switching has been demonstrated using photonic crystals or microdisks coupled to quantum dots, but these systems were not well externally matched: hundreds of incident photons were thus required to trigger the optical nonlinearity.
The future Internet is very likely the mixture of all-optical Internet with low power consumption and quantum Internet with absolute security guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Photons would be used for processing, routing and com-munication of data, and photonic transistor using a weak light to control a strong light is the core component as an optical analogue to the electronic transistor that forms the basis of modern electronics. In sharp contrast to previous all-optical tran-sistors which are all based on optical nonlinearities, here I introduce a novel design for a high-gain and high-speed (up to terahertz) photonic transistor and its counterpart in the quantum limit, i.e., single-photon transistor based on a linear optical effect: giant Faraday rotation induced by a single electronic spin in a single-sided optical microcavity. A single-photon or classical optical pulse as the gate sets the spin state via projective measurement and controls the polarization of a strong light to open/block the photonic channel. Due to the duality as quantum gate for quantum information processing and transistor for optical information processing, this versatile spin-cavity quantum transistor provides a solid-state platform ideal for all-optical networks and quantum networks.
Generating strong interactions between single quanta of light and matter is central to quantum information science, and a key component of quantum computers and long-distance quantum networks. In quantum information processing, these interactions are required to create elementary logic operations (quantum gates) between stationary matter quantum bits (qubits) and photonic qubits that can be transmitted over long distances. Efficient quantum gates between photonic and matter qubits are a crucial enabler for a broad range of applications that include robust quantum networks, nondestructive quantum measurements, and strong photon-photon interactions. So far these qubit-photon gates have been achieved using single atoms and at microwave frequencies in circuit QED systems. Their implementation with solidstate quantum emitters, however, has remained a difficult challenge. We demonstrate that the qubit state of a photon can be controlled by a single solid-state qubit composed of a quantum dot (QD) strongly coupled to an optical nanocavity. We show that the QD acts as a coherently controllable qubit system that conditionally flips the polarization of a photon reflected from the cavity mode on picosecond timescales. This operation implements a controlled NOT (cNOT) logic gate between the QD and the incident photon, which is a universal quantum operation that can serve as a general light-matter interface for remote entanglements and quantum computations. Our results represent an important step towards an all solid-state implementation of quantum networks and quantum computers, and provide a versatile approach for controlling and probing interactions between a photon and a single quantum emitter on ultra-fast timescales.
An all-optical transistor is a device in which a gate light pulse switches the transmission of a target light pulse with a gain above unity. The gain quantifies the change of the transmitted target photon number per incoming gate photon. We study the quantum limit of one incoming gate photon and observe a gain of 20. The gate pulse is stored as a Rydberg excitation in an ultracold gas. The transmission of the subsequent target pulse is suppressed by Rydberg blockade, which is enhanced by a Förster resonance. The detected target photons reveal in a single shot with a fidelity above 0.86 whether a Rydberg excitation was created during the gate pulse. The gain offers the possibility to distribute the transistor output to the inputs of many transistors, thus making complex computational tasks possible.