We develop quantum holograms by analyzing the light scattered from quantum metasurfaces made out of strongly interacting atoms for applications such as the non-destructive probing of many-body atomic state dynamics.
Metasurfaces, with their capability to control all possible dimensions of light, have become integral to quantum optical applications, including quantum state generation, operation, and tomography. We utilize a metasurface to generate polarization–hologram hybrid entanglement between a signal–idler photon pair to construct a quantum hologram. The properties of the quantum hologram can be revealed by collapsing the polarization degree of freedom of the idler photon, inducing interference between two holographic states of the signal photon as a meaningful and selective erasure of the holographic content. On the contrary, interference disappears when the idler photon is detected without observing polarization. This process can be further interpreted as a quantum holographic eraser, where the erasing action is visualized with erased contents in holograms. Our construction of a polarization–hologram hybrid entangled state with metasurfaces will be useful for quantum communication with enhanced robustness, anticounterfeiting applications through the additional quantum degrees of freedom or phase difference between two holographic states, and as an emerging platform for exploring fundamental quantum concepts for entanglement and nonlocality.
Quantum metasurfaces composed of subwavelength two-dimensional atomic arrays hold great promise as a practical and scalable atom-photon interface. However, these quantum metasurfaces are limited to amplitude control of photonic states thereby restricting the quantum information processing task they can implement. In this work, we present a method that enables precise control over the phase distribution of quantum photonic states. We achieve this by developing a quantum holography technique, which involves preparing a superposition of holograms and leveraging both electromagnetically induced transparency and long-range Rydberg interactions. Our method enables encoding of arbitrary recoverable images that are entangled with the atomic array degrees of freedom rapidly on the order of microseconds. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to include many-body atom-photon entangled states by establishing a quantitative mapping between the atomic and photonic states. Finally, we discuss the experimental realization of our approach, potential error mechanisms, and practical quantum optics applications.