No Arabic abstract
Biphotons of narrow bandwidth and long temporal length play a crucial role in long-distance quantum communication (LDQC) and linear optical quantum computing (LOQC). However, generation of these photons usually requires atomic ensembles with high optical depth or spontaneous parametric down-conversion with sophisticated optical cavity. By manipulating the two-component biphoton wavefunction generated from a low-optical-depth (low-OD) atomic ensemble, we demonstrate biphotons with subnatural linewidth in the sub-MHz regime. The potential of shaping and manipulating the quantum wavepackets of these temporally long photons is also demonstrated and discussed. Our work has potential applications in realizing quantum repeaters and large cluster states for LDQC and LOQC, respectively. The possibility to generate and manipulate subnatural-linewidth biphotons with low OD also opens up new opportunity to miniaturize the biphoton source for implementing quantum technologies on chip-scale quantum devices.
We demonstrate an efficient experimental scheme for producing polarization-entangled photon pairs from spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in a laser-cooled $^{85}$Rb atomic ensemble, with a bandwidth (as low as 0.8 MHz) much narrower than the rubidium atomic natural linewidth. By stabilizing the relative phase between the two SFWM paths in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer configuration, we are able to produce all four Bell states. These subnatural-linewidth photon pairs with polarization entanglement are ideal quantum information carriers for connecting remote atomic quantum nodes via efficient light-matter interaction in a photon-atom quantum network.
We observe spatial fringes in the interference of two beams, which are controlled by a third beam through the phenomenon of induced coherence without induced emission. We show that the interference pattern depends on the alignment of this beam in an analogous way as fringes created in a traditional division-of-amplitude interferometer depend on the relative alignment of the two interfering beams. We demonstrate that the pattern is characterized by an equivalent wavelength, which corresponds to a combination of the wavelengths of the involved physical light beams.
We propose a new type of superradiant laser based on a hot atomic beam traversing an optical cavity. We show that the theoretical minimum linewidth and maximum power are competitive with the best ultracoherent clock lasers. Also, our system operates naturally in continuous wave mode, which has been elusive for superradiant lasers so far. Unlike existing ultracoherent lasers, our design is simple and rugged. This makes it a candidate for the first widely accessible ultracoherent laser, as well as the first to realize sought-after applications of ultracoherent lasers in challenging environments.
Quantum logic gates with many control qubits are essential in many quantum algorithms, but remain challenging to perform in current experiments. Trapped ion quantum computers natively feature a different type of entangling operation, namely the Molmer-Sorensen (MS) gate which effectively applies an Ising interaction to all qubits at the same time. We consider a sequence of equal all-to-all MS operations, interleaved with single qubit gates that act only on one special qubit. Using a connection with quantum signal processing techniques, we find that it is possible to perform an arbitray SU(2) rotation on the special qubit if and only if all other qubits are in the state |1>. Such controlled rotation gates with N-1 control qubits require 2N applications of the MS gate, and can be mapped to a conventional Toffoli gate by demoting a single qubit to ancilla.
In classical optics, Youngs double-slit experiment with colored coherent light gives rise to individual interference fringes for each light frequency, referring to single-photon interference. However, two-photon double-slit interference has been widely studied only for wavelength-degenerate biphoton, known as subwavelength quantum lithography. In this work, we report double-slit interference experiments with two-color biphoton. Different from the degenerate case, the experimental results depend on the measurement methods. From a two-axis coincidence measurement pattern we can extract complete interference information about two colors. The conceptual model provides an intuitional picture of the in-phase and out-of-phase photon correlations and a complete quantum understanding about the which-path information of two colored photons.