We examine the possibility of coherent, reversible information transfer between solid-state superconducting qubits and ensembles of ultra-cold atoms. Strong coupling between these systems is mediated by a microwave transmission line resonator that interacts near-resonantly with the atoms via their optically excited Rydberg states. The solid-state qubits can then be used to implement rapid quantum logic gates, while collective metastable states of the atoms can be employed for long-term storage and optical read-out of quantum information.
We demonstrate the reversible mapping of a coherent state of light with mean photon number n-bar ~= 1.1 to and from the hyperfine states of an atom trapped within the mode of a high finesse optical cavity. The coherence of the basic processes is verified by mapping the atomic state back onto a field state in a way that depends on the phase of the original coherent state. Our experiment represents an important step towards the realization of cavity QED-based quantum networks, wherein coherent transfer of quantum states enables the distribution of quantum information across the network.
Performing a faithful transfer of an unknown quantum state is a key challenge for enabling quantum networks. The realization of networks with a small number of quantum links is now actively pursued, which calls for an assessment of different state transfer methods to guide future design decisions. Here, we theoretically investigate quantum state transfer between two distant qubits, each in a cavity, connected by a waveguide, e.g., an optical fiber. We evaluate the achievable success probabilities of state transfer for two different protocols: standard wave packet shaping and adiabatic passage. The main loss sources are transmission losses in the waveguide and absorption losses in the cavities. While special cases studied in the literature indicate that adiabatic passages may be beneficial in this context, it remained an open question under which conditions this is the case and whether their use will be advantageous in practice. We answer these questions by providing a full analysis, showing that state transfer by adiabatic passage -- in contrast to wave packet shaping -- can mitigate the effects of undesired cavity losses, far beyond the regime of coupling to a single waveguide mode and the regime of lossless waveguides, as was proposed so far. Furthermore, we show that the photon arrival probability is in fact bounded in a trade-off between losses due to non-adiabaticity and due to coupling to off-resonant waveguide modes. We clarify that neither protocol can avoid transmission losses and discuss how the cavity parameters should be chosen to achieve an optimal state transfer.
We study a hybrid quantum system consisting of spin ensembles and superconducting flux qubits, where each spin ensemble is realized using the nitrogen-vacancy centers in a diamond crystal and the nearest-neighbor spin ensembles are effectively coupled via a flux qubit.We show that the coupling strengths between flux qubits and spin ensembles can reach the strong and even ultrastrong coupling regimes by either engineering the hybrid structure in advance or tuning the excitation frequencies of spin ensembles via external magnetic fields. When extending the hybrid structure to an array with equal coupling strengths, we find that in the strong-coupling regime, the hybrid array is reduced to a tight-binding model of a one-dimensional bosonic lattice. In the ultrastrong-coupling regime, it exhibits quasiparticle excitations separated from the ground state by an energy gap. Moreover, these quasiparticle excitations and the ground state are stable under a certain condition that is tunable via the external magnetic field. This may provide an experimentally accessible method to probe the instability of the system.
The Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) encoding of a qubit within an oscillator provides a number of advantages when used in a fault-tolerant architecture for quantum computing, most notably that Gaussian operations suffice to implement all single- and two-qubit Clifford gates. The main drawback of the encoding is that the logical states themselves are challenging to produce. Here we present a method for generating optical GKP-encoded qubits by coupling an atomic ensemble to a squeezed state of light. Particular outcomes of a subsequent spin measurement of the ensemble herald successful generation of the resource state in the optical mode. We analyze the method in terms of the resources required (total spin and amount of squeezing) and the probability of success. We propose a physical implementation using a Faraday-based quantum non-demolition interaction.
We suggest to interface nanomechanical systems via an optical quantum bus to atomic ensembles, for which means of high precision state preparation, manipulation and measurement are available. This allows in particular for a Quantum Non-Demolition Bell measurement, projecting the coupled system, atomic ensemble - nanomechanical resonator, into an entangled EPR-state. The entanglement is observable even for nanoresonators initially well above their ground states and can be utilized for teleportation of states from an atomic ensemble to the mechanical system.