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Light Science & Applications

Creating heralded hyper-entangled photons using Rydberg atoms

Sutapa Ghosh, Nicholas Rivera, G. Eisenstein, Ido E. Kaminer

Published May 12, 2021• 16 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Entangled photon pairs are a fundamental component for testing the foundations of quantum mechanics, and for modern quantum technologies such as teleportation and secured communication. Current state-of-the-art sources are based on nonlinear processes that are limited in their efficiency and wavelength tunability. This motivates the exploration of physical mechanisms for entangled photon generation, with a special interest in mechanisms that can be heralded, preferably at telecommunications wavelengths. Here we present a mechanism for the generation of heralded entangled photons from Rydberg atom cavity quantum electrodynamics (cavity QED). We propose a scheme to demonstrate the mechanism and quantify its expected performance. The heralding of the process enables non-destructive detection of the photon pairs. The entangled photons are produced by exciting a rubidium atom to a Rydberg state, from where the atom decays via two-photon emission (TPE). A Rydberg blockade helps to excite a single Rydberg excitation while the input light field is more efficiently collectively absorbed by all the atoms. The TPE rate is significantly enhanced by a designed photonic cavity, whose many resonances also translate into high-dimensional entanglement. The resulting high-dimensionally entangled photons are entangled in more than one degree of freedom: in all of their spectral components, in addition to the polarization-forming a hyper-entangled state, which is particularly interesting in high information capacity quantum communication. We characterize the photon comb states by analyzing the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference and propose proof-of-concept experiments.

DOI
10.1038/s41377-021-00537-2

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Entangled photon pairs are a fundamental component for testing the foundations of quantum mechanics, and for modern quantum technologies such as teleportation and secured communication. Current state-of-the-art sources are based on nonlinear processes that are limited in their efficiency and wavelength tunability. This motivates the exploration of physical mechanisms for entangled photon generation, with a special interest in mechanisms that can be heralded, preferably at telecommunications wavelengths. Here we present a mechanism for the generation of heralded entangled photons from Rydberg atom cavity quantum electrodynamics (cavity QED). We propose a scheme to demonstrate the mechanism and quantify its expected performance. The heralding of the process enables non-destructive detection of the photon pairs. The entangled photons are produced by exciting a rubidium atom to a Rydberg state, from where the atom decays via two-photon emission (TPE). A Rydberg blockade helps to excite a single Rydberg excitation while the input light field is more efficiently collectively absorbed by all the atoms. The TPE rate is significantly enhanced by a designed photonic cavity, whose many resonances also translate into high-dimensional entanglement. The resulting high-dimensionally entangled photons are entangled in more than one degree of freedom: in all of their spectral components, in addition to the polarization-forming a hyper-entangled state, which is particularly interesting in high information capacity quantum communication. We characterize the photon comb states by analyzing the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference and propose proof-of-concept experiments.
Heralded storage of photons is crucial for advancing quantum networks. Previous realizations have primarily relied on single atoms strongly coupled to optical cavities. In this work, we present the experimental realization of heralded storage using a Rydberg superatom, a mesoscopic atomic ensemble operating in the strong blockade regime. In our approach, an input photon is initially stored in the superatom via electromagnetically induced transparency. Subsequently, a second photon is emitted conditioned on the success of the first photon's storage. Because of the collectively enhanced interaction, both the storage and the emission of the herald photon can be rather efficient in principle. As a demonstration of this technique, we use it to entangle two remote Rydberg superatoms. This method obviates the need for an intermediate node, which is commonly employed in traditional interference-based remote entanglement schemes. Our results showcase the potential of performing cavity-QED-like experiments with Rydberg superatoms. This work opens pathways for numerous applications in quantum networks and linear optical quantum computing.
Photons are good candidates for carrying quantum information because they are very stable particles: they interact weakly with the medium and barely with each other. However, this has drawbacks when you want to process the information because, in this case, it is preferable to have photon-photon interactions. For example, for applications in quantum repeaters, such interactions would allow deterministic Bell state measurements, increasing the entanglement distribution rate between two remote nodes. Getting two photons to interact with each other efficiently requires mapping them into a nonlinear medium at the single-photon level, that is, a medium that reacts differently when it interacts with a single photon than when it does with two. Such strong nonlinearity has been demonstrated with Rydberg atoms, which are atoms excited to a state with a high principal quantum number. In this thesis we have performed nonlinear quantum optics experiments using an ensemble of cold Rydberg atoms, where we have studied the properties of the quantum light emitted by these atoms. First, we demonstrated nonlinearities at the single-photon level. To reach this stage, we made several improvements to the previous experimental setup available in the group, of which the implementation of a dipole trap was especially relevant. We evidence quantum nonlinearity by measuring photon antibunching for the transmitted light after interacting with the Rydberg state under electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). We also showed the generation of single photons on-demand after storing weak coherent states of light pulses as collective Rydberg excitations. Then, we studied the variation of the light statistic throughout the output pulse after propagating through the medium as Rydberg polaritons, which are superposition states of light and Rydberg excitations. We showed that the properties at the beginning and the end of the pulse were different from those of the steady state. In particular, the light detected after the input pulse was abruptly turned off gave much stronger suppression of two-photon events. Then, we investigated how to exploit this effect to generate single photons on demand. To do this, we analyzed the quality of the single photons detected at the end of the pulse as a function of the detection probability and compared the results with those obtained by storing the input pulse as collective Rydberg excitations. We showed that the photons were generated more efficiently when increasing the detection window at the cost of deteriorating the single photons statistics. Finally, we investigated the indistinguishability of the photons emitted by our Rydberg atomic ensemble, a crucial property for using Rydberg atoms as nodes in quantum networks. We also compared the single photons generated after storage under EIT conditions with those obtained using a two-photon Raman excitation to the Rydberg state. We measured the indistinguishability by making them interfere with weak coherent states of light in a Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment. And we showed that, although we obtained better photon statistics under EIT conditions, the indistinguishability from those obtained with Raman excitation was significantly higher.
Entanglement between a single photon and a matter qubit is an indispensable resource for quantum repeater and quantum networks. With atomic ensembles, the entanglement creation probability is typically very low to inhibit high-order events. In this paper, we propose and experimentally realize a scheme that creates atom-photon entanglement with an intrinsic efficiency of 50%. We make use of Rydberg blockade to generate two collective excitations, lying in separate internal states. By introducing the momentum degree of freedom for the excitations, and interfering them via Raman coupling, we entangle the two excitations. Via retrieving one excitation, we create the entanglement between the polarization of a single photon and the momentum of the remaining atomic excitation, with a measured fidelity of 0.901(8). The retrieved optical field is verified to be genuine single photons. The realized entanglement may be employed to create entanglement between two distant nodes in a fully heralded way and with a much higher efficiency.
Summary form only given. Entanglement, a fundamental resource of quantum technologies, is a unique quantum mechanical attribute. In various systems it can be achieved in various individual degrees of freedom, however some of those systems are able to create entanglement in multiple degrees of freedom simultaneously: hyper-entanglement [1]. Here, we report on demonstration of polarization [2] and time-bin [3] hyper-entangled photons emitted from a single quantum dot. By applying two-photon resonant and coherent excitation on a quantum dot system with marginal fine structure splitting we yield fidelities to the maximally entangled state of 0.80(3) and 0.87(4) in polarization and time-bin, respectively. Quantum enhanced communication schemes rely on Bell-state measurements, which find their simplest realization in the interference of two photons at a beam splitter. However, this method is efficiency limited [4] and a complete Bell state analysis of a photon pair entangled in one degree of freedom using only linear optics is impossible. This limitation can be overcome if the photon pair is entangled in more than one degree of freedom, a hyper-entangled state. Using such states in such schemes does not only reduce the resource overhead [5] it also offers the possibility to increase the success rate significantly [6].
The realization of a Jaynes-Cummings model in the optical domain is proposed for an atomic ensemble. The scheme exploits the collective coupling of the atoms to a quantized cavity mode and the nonlinearity introduced by coupling to high-lying Rydberg states. A two-photon transition resonantly couples the single-atom ground state $|g\ensuremath{\rangle}$ to a Rydberg state $|e\ensuremath{\rangle}$ via a nonresonant intermediate state $|i\ensuremath{\rangle}$, but due to the interaction between Rydberg atoms only a single atom can be resonantly excited in the ensemble. This restricts the state space of the ensemble to the collective ground state $|G\ensuremath{\rangle}$ and the collectively excited state $|E\ensuremath{\rangle}$ with a single Rydberg excitation distributed evenly on all atoms. The collectively enhanced coupling of all atoms to the cavity field with coherent coupling strengths which are much larger than the decay rates in the system leads to the strong coupling regime of the resulting effective Jaynes-Cummings model. We use numerical simulations to show that the cavity transmission can be used to reveal detailed properties of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder of excited states and that the atomic nonlinearity gives rise to highly nontrivial photon emission from the cavity. Finally, we suggest that the absence of interactions between remote Rydberg atoms may, due to a combinatorial effect, induce a cavity-assisted excitation blockade whose range is larger than the typical Rydberg dipole-dipole interaction length.