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Physics

Controlling Single Photons with Rydberg Superatoms

Wenchao Xu, Vladan Vuletić

Published May 11, 2022• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

New schemes based on Rydberg superatoms placed in optical cavities can be used to manipulate single photons with high efficiency.
DOI
10.1103/physics.15.70

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We demonstrate a new versatile building block for optical quantum technologies, enabling deterministic quantum engineering of light by combining the advantages of two complementary approaches: cavity quantum electrodynamics and interacting atomic ensembles.Our system is based on an intracavity Rydberg-blockaded atomic ensemble acting as a single two-level superatom.We coherently control its state and optically detect it in a single shot with 95% efficiency.Crucially, we demonstrate a superatom-statedependent π phase rotation on the light reflected from the cavity.Together with the state manipulation and detection, it is a key ingredient for implementing deterministic photonic entangling gates and for generating highly nonclassical light states.
We demonstrate a new approach for creating deterministic photon-photon interactions for optical quantum engineering, based on a single-ended medium-finesse optical cavity containing a mesoscopic atomic ensemble. This ensemble is made transparent by a laser beam mapping intracavity photons into Rydberg polaritons. The transparency vanishes when the cloud, acting as a single collective two-level "superatom" with an enhanced coupling to light, is driven from the ground to a Rydberg state. We observe collectively-enhanced Rabi oscillations between these states, optically discriminate them in a single shot with a 95% effciency, and show that a change between the two internal states of the superatom induces a π phase rotation on the light reflected off of the cavity. These ingredients form a complete set of tools for implementing deterministic photonic entangling gates and for generating highly non-classical light without the need for a low-volume high-finesse cavity.
The W state, as a robust multipartite entangled state, plays an important role in quantum information processing, quantum network construction and quantum computing. In this paper, a three-level ladder-type Rydberg atomic system is placed into a Rydberg blocking sphere to form a superatom. Each superatom has many collective states including just one Rydberg excitation constrained by the Rydberg blockade effect. In the weak cavity field limit, at most one atom can be pumped into excited state, then we can describe the superatom by using a three-level ladder-type system. Afterwards we encode quantum information about the effective energy levels of Rydberg superatoms and propose a fast scheme for preparing the Rydberg superatom W state based on the superadiabatic iterative technique and quantum Zeno dynamics.This scheme can be achieved in only one step by controlling the laser pulses. In this scheme, the superatoms are trapped in spatially separated cavities connected by optical fibers, thereby greatly improving the feasibility of experimental manipulation. A remarkable feature is that it does not need to accurately control experimental parameters and interaction time. Meanwhile, the form of counterdiabatic Hamiltonian is the same as that of the effective Hamiltonian. Through numerical simulations, the fidelity of this scheme can reach 99.94%. Even considering decoherence effects, including atomic spontaneous emission and photon leakage, the fidelity can still exceed 97.5%, thereby further demonstrating the strong robustness of the solution. In addition, the Rabi frequency can be characterized as a linear superposition of Gaussian functions, and this representation significantly alleviates the complexity encountered in practical experiments. Futhermore, we also analyze the influence of parameter fluctuations on the fidelity, and the results show that this scheme is robust against parameter fluctuations. Finally, the present scheme is extended to the case of N Rydberg superatoms, which shows the scalability of our scheme.