Entanglement of Momentum for a Single Photon with a Single Atom

Rui Guo, Hong Mei Guo

With the quantum interference between two transition pathways, we demonstrate a scheme to coherently control the momentum entanglement between a single atom and a single photon. The unavoidable disentanglement is also studied from the first principle, which indicates that the stably entangled atom-photon system with superhigh degree of entanglement may be realized with this scheme under certain conditions.

B. B. Blinov, David L. Moehring, Luming Duan +1 more

Jun Li, Ming-Ti Zhou, Chao-Wei Yang +4 more

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.

Moehring, Блинов, Madsen +2 more

Rui Guo, Xiaoji Zhou, Xuzong Chen

With the mechanism of pairwise scattering of photons between two atoms, we propose a novel scheme to highly entangle the motional state between two ultracold neutral atoms by a single photon scattering and detection. Under certain conditions, it is shown that an arbitrary amount of entanglement can be obtained with this scheme.

Samina Masood