We present the design, fabrication, and experimental implementation of surface ion traps with Y-shaped junctions. The traps are designed to minimize the pseudopotential variations in the junction region at the symmetric intersection of three linear s
egments. We experimentally demonstrate robust linear and junction shuttling with greater than one million round-trip shuttles without ion loss. By minimizing the direct line of sight between trapped ions and dielectric surfaces, negligible day-to-day and trap-to-trap variations are observed. In addition to high-fidelity single-ion shuttling, multiple-ion chains survive splitting, ion-position swapping, and recombining routines. The development of two-dimensional trapping structures is an important milestone for ion-trap quantum computing and quantum simulations.
While the phase of a coherent light field can be precisely known, the phase of the individual photons that create this field, considered individually, cannot. Phase changes within single-photon wave packets, however, have observable effects. In fact,
actively controlling the phase of individual photons has been identified as a powerful resource for quantum communication protocols. Here we demonstrate the arbitrary phase control of a single photon. The phase modulation is applied without affecting the photons amplitude profile and is verified via a two-photon quantum interference measurement, which can result in the fermionic spatial behaviour of photon pairs. Combined with previously demonstrated control of a single photons amplitude, frequency, and polarisation, the fully deterministic phase shaping presented here allows for the complete control of single-photon wave packets.
We report on the fast excitation of a single atom coupled to an optical cavity using laser pulses that are much shorter than all other relevant processes. The cavity frequency constitutes a control parameter that allows the creation of single photons
in a superposition of two tunable frequencies. Each photon emitted from the cavity thus exhibits a pronounced amplitude modulation determined by the oscillatory energy exchange between the atom and the cavity. Our technique constitutes a versatile tool for future quantum networking experiments.
An experiment is performed where a single rubidium atom trapped within a high-finesse optical cavity emits two independently triggered entangled photons. The entanglement is mediated by the atom and is characterized both by a Bell inequality violatio
n of S=2.5, as well as full quantum-state tomography, resulting in a fidelity exceeding F=90%. The combination of cavity-QED and trapped atom techniques makes our protocol inherently deterministic - an essential step for the generation of scalable entanglement between the nodes of a distributed quantum network.
