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Experimental certification of millions of genuinely entangled atoms in a solid

Florian Fröwis, Peter C. Strassmann, Alexey Tiranov, Corentin Gut, Jonathan Lavoie, Nicolas Brunner, Félix Bussières, Mikael Afzelius, Nicolas Gisin

Published Jan 1, 2017• 20 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum theory predicts that entanglement can also persist in macroscopic physical systems, albeit difficulties to demonstrate it experimentally remain. Recently, significant progress has been achieved and genuine entanglement between up to 2900 atoms was reported. Here, we demonstrate 16 million genuinely entangled atoms in a solid-state quantum memory prepared by the heralded absorption of a single photon. We develop an entanglement witness for quantifying the number of genuinely entangled particles based on the collective effect of directed emission combined with the non-classical nature of the emitted light. The method is applicable to a wide range of physical systems and is effective even in situations with significant losses. Our results clarify the role of multipartite entanglement in ensemble-based quantum memories and demonstrate the accessibility to certain classes of multipartite entanglement with limited experimental control. © 2017 The Author(s).

DOI
10.15488/2269

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Quantum theory predicts that entanglement can also persist in macroscopic physical systems, albeit difficulties to demonstrate it experimentally remain. Recently, significant progress has been achieved and genuine entanglement between up to 2900 atoms was reported. Here, we demonstrate 16 million genuinely entangled atoms in a solid-state quantum memory prepared by the heralded absorption of a single photon. We develop an entanglement witness for quantifying the number of genuinely entangled particles based on the collective effect of directed emission combined with the non-classical nature of the emitted light. The method is applicable to a wide range of physical systems and is effective even in situations with significant losses. Our results clarify the role of multipartite entanglement in ensemble-based quantum memories and demonstrate the accessibility to certain classes of multipartite entanglement with limited experimental control. © 2017 The Author(s).
Quantum theory predicts that entanglement can also persist in macroscopic physical systems, albeit difficulties to demonstrate it experimentally remain. Recently, significant progress has been achieved and genuine entanglement between up to 2900 atoms was reported. Here, we demonstrate 16 million genuinely entangled atoms in a solid-state quantum memory prepared by the heralded absorption of a single photon. We develop an entanglement witness for quantifying the number of genuinely entangled particles based on the collective effect of directed emission combined with the non-classical nature of the emitted light. The method is applicable to a wide range of physical systems and is effective even in situations with significant losses. Our results clarify the role of multipartite entanglement in ensemble-based quantum memories and demonstrate the accessibility to certain classes of multipartite entanglement with limited experimental control. © 2017 The Author(s).
Quantum theory predicts that entanglement can also persist in macroscopic physical systems, albeit difficulties to demonstrate it experimentally remain. Recently, significant progress has been achieved and genuine entanglement between up to 2900 atoms was reported. Here, we demonstrate 16 million genuinely entangled atoms in a solid-state quantum memory prepared by the heralded absorption of a single photon. We develop an entanglement witness for quantifying the number of genuinely entangled particles based on the collective effect of directed emission combined with the non-classical nature of the emitted light. The method is applicable to a wide range of physical systems and is effective even in situations with significant losses. Our results clarify the role of multipartite entanglement in ensemble-based quantum memories and demonstrate the accessibility to certain classes of multipartite entanglement with limited experimental control.The presence of entanglement in macroscopic systems is notoriously difficult to observe. Here, the authors develop a witness which allow them to demonstrate entanglement between millions of atoms in a solid-state quantum memory prepared by the heralded absorption of a single photon.
Abstract Quantum theory does not prevent entanglement from being created and observed in macroscopic physical systems, in reality however, the accessible scale of entanglement is still very limited due to decoherence effects. Recently, entanglement has been observed among atoms from thousands to millions levels in extremely low-temperature and well isolated systems. Here, we create multipartite entanglement of billions of motional atoms in a quantum memory at room temperature and certify the genuine entanglement via M-separability witness associated with photon statistics. The information contained in a single photon is found strongly correlated with the excitation shared by the motional atoms, which intrinsically address the large system and therefore stimulate the multipartite entanglement. Remarkably, our heralded and quantum memory built-in entanglement generation allows us to directly observe the dynamic evolution of entanglement depth and further to reveal the effects of decoherence. Our results verify the existence of genuine multipartite entanglement among billions of motional atoms at ambient conditions, significantly extending the boundary of the accessible scale of entanglement.
There are both fundamental and practical motivations for studying whether quantum entanglement can exist in macroscopic systems. However, multiparty entanglement is generally fragile and difficult to quantify. Dicke states are multiparty entangled states where a single excitation is delocalized over many systems. Building on previous work on quantum memories for photons, we create a Dicke state in a solid by storing a single photon in a crystal that contains many large atomic ensembles with distinct resonance frequencies. The photon is re-emitted at a well-defined time due to an interference effect analogous to multi-slit diffraction. We derive a lower bound for the number of entangled ensembles based on the contrast of the interference and the single-photon character of the input, and we experimentally demonstrate entanglement between over two hundred ensembles, each containing a billion atoms. We also illustrate the fact that each individual ensemble contains further entanglement.Multipartite entanglement is of both fundamental and practical interest, but is notoriously difficult to witness and characterise. Here, Zarkeshian et al. demonstrate multipartite entanglement in an atomic frequency comb storing a single photon in a Dicke state spread over a macroscopic ensemble.
We show how radiation emitted from a collection of noninteracting two-level particles, which can be treated as qubits, can be used to detect a wide class of entangled states of this system. This result is an example of a macroscopical manifestation of entanglement that can be inferred from direct measurements. Some examples of physical effects directly related to the collective emission of radiation, such as photon echoes and superradiance, are discussed, suggesting some ways of how to experimentally witness entanglement with simple and standard techniques.
Quantum mechanics predicts microscopic phenomena with undeniable success. Nevertheless, current theoretical and experimental efforts still do not yield conclusive evidence that there is or is not a fundamental limitation on the possibility to observe quantum phenomena at the macroscopic scale. This question prompted several experimental efforts producing quantum superpositions of large quantum states in light or matter. We report on the observation of quantum correlations, revealed using an entanglement witness, between a single photon and an atomic ensemble of billions of ions frozen in a crystal. The matter part of the state involves the superposition of two macroscopically distinguishable solid-state components composed of several tens of atomic excitations. Assuming the insignificance of the time ordering our experiment indirectly shows light-matter micro-macro entanglement. Our approach leverages from quantum memory techniques and could be used in other systems to expand the size of quantum superpositions in matter.