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arXiv:quant-ph/0611165 · Physical Review A

Analysis of a quantum memory for photons based on controlled reversible inhomogeneous broadening

Nicolas Sangouard, Christoph Simon, Mikael Afzelius, Nicolas Gisin

Published Mar 21, 2007• 130 citations
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Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of a quantum memory for photons based on controlled and reversible inhomogeneous broadening. The explicit solution of the equations of motion is obtained in the weak excitation regime, making it possible to gain insight into the dependence of the memory efficiency on the optical depth, and on the width and shape of the atomic spectral distributions. We also study a simplified memory protocol which does not require any optical control fields.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.75.032327

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We present a detailed analysis of a quantum memory for photons based on controlled and reversible inhomogeneous broadening. The explicit solution of the equations of motion is obtained in the weak excitation regime, making it possible to gain insight into the dependence of the memory efficiency on the optical depth, and on the width and shape of the atomic spectral distributions. We also study a simplified memory protocol which does not require any optical control fields.
This paper presents a simple quantum memory method for efficient storage and retrieve of light. The technique is based on the principle of controlled reversible inhomogeneous broadening for which the information of the quantum state light is imprinted in a two-level atoms ensemble and recalled by flipping the external nonuniform electric field. In present work, the induced Stark shift varied linearly with position, and a numerical analysis for this protocol has been studied. It shows that the storage efficiency can nearly reach 100% with a large enough optical depth, and the optimal broadening for a given pulse width is also analyzed.
We propose a method to implement a quantum memory for light based on ensembles of two-level atoms. Our protocol is based on controlled reversible inhomogeneous broadening (CRIB), where an external field first dephases the atomic polarization and thereby stores an incoming light pulse into collective states of the atomic ensemble, and later a reversal of the applied field leads to a rephasing of the atomic polarization and a reemission of the light. As opposed to previous proposals for CRIB-based quantum memories, we propose only applying the broadening for a short period after most of the pulse has already been absorbed by the ensemble. We show that with this procedure there exist certain modes of the incoming light field that can be stored with an efficiency approaching 100% in the limit of high optical depth and long coherence time of the atoms. These results demonstrate that it is possible to operate an efficient quantum memory without any optical control fields.
It has recently been discovered that the optical analog of a gradient echo, in an optically thick material, could form the basis of an optical memory that is both completely efficient and noise-free. Here we present analytical calculations showing that this is the case. There is close analogy between the operation of the memory and an optical system with two beam splitters. We can use this analogy to calculate efficiencies as a function of optical depth for a number of quantum memory schemes based on controlled inhomogeneous broadening. In particular, we show that multiple switching leads to a net 100% retrieval efficiency for the optical gradient echo even in the optically thin case.
We propose an efficient quantum memory scheme with controlled reversible inhomogeneous broadening in an optical cavity.When the absorption per cavity round trip exactly matches the transmission of the coupling mirror(impedance matching condition),we show that the input light field can be completely absorbed by an inhomogeneous broadening atomic ensemble.From calculation we obtain that either a forward or a backward retrieval process the quantum memory efficiency can reach unity even for a small optical depth of the atomic system.If there is no cavity,100% efficiency is obtained only for extremely large optical depth.A high efficiency for the quantum memory at a small optical depth is easily achieved in practice.Therefore our proposal offers promising possibilities for the practical realization of high quantum memory efficiency.
We develop the general theoretical approach to an optical quantum memory (QM) based on the three-pulse photon echo (PE) with controlled reversible inhomogeneous broadening. The wavefunction of the retrieved photon echo field is derived explicitly as a function of an arbitrary input data light field taking into account the nonlinear interaction between the quantum light fields and the atomic medium. The result opens a clear possibility for quantum manipulations with arbitrary single- and multi-photon entangled light fields.