Photonics is a promising platform for quantum technologies. However, photon sources and two-photon gates currently only operate probabilistically. Large-scale photonic processing will therefore be impossible without a multiplexing strategy to activel
y select successful events. High time-bandwidth-product quantum memories - devices that store and retrieve single photons on-demand - provide an efficient remedy via active synchronisation. Here we interface a GHz-bandwidth heralded single-photon source and a room-temperature Raman memory with a time-bandwidth product exceeding 1000. We store heralded single photons and observe a clear influence of the input photon statistics on the retrieved light, which agrees with our theoretical model. The preservation of the stored fields statistics is limited by four-wave-mixing noise, which we identify as the key remaining challenge in the development of practical memories for scalable photonic information processing.
We demonstrate a dual-rail optical Raman memory inside a polarization interferometer; this enables us to store polarization-encoded information at GHz bandwidths in a room-temperature atomic ensemble. By performing full process tomography on the syst
em we measure up to 97pm1% process fidelity for the storage and retrieval process. At longer storage times, the process fidelity remains high, despite a loss of efficiency. The fidelity is 86pm4% for 1.5 mu s storage time, which is 5,000 times the pulse duration. Hence high fidelity is combined with a large time-bandwidth product. This high performance, with an experimentally simple setup, demonstrates the suitability of the Raman memory for integration into large-scale quantum networks.
