Creating heralded hyper-entangled photons using Rydberg atoms

Journal Article · Wed May 12 00:00:00 EDT 2021 · Light, Science & Applications

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-021-00537-2· OSTI ID:1816720

Ghosh, Sutapa ^[1]; Rivera, Nicholas ^[2]; Eisenstein, Gadi ^[3]; Kaminer, Ido ^[3]

---

1. Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa (Israel); OSTI
2. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
3. Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa (Israel)

Entangled photon pairs are a fundamental component for testing the foundations of quantum mechanics, and for modern quantum technologies such as teleportation and secured communication. Current state-of-the-art sources are based on nonlinear processes that are limited in their efficiency and wavelength tunability. This motivates the exploration of physical mechanisms for entangled photon generation, with a special interest in mechanisms that can be heralded, preferably at telecommunications wavelengths. Here we present a mechanism for the generation of heralded entangled photons from Rydberg atom cavity quantum electrodynamics (cavity QED). We propose a scheme to demonstrate the mechanism and quantify its expected performance. The heralding of the process enables non-destructive detection of the photon pairs. The entangled photons are produced by exciting a rubidium atom to a Rydberg state, from where the atom decays via two-photon emission (TPE). A Rydberg blockade helps to excite a single Rydberg excitation while the input light field is more efficiently collectively absorbed by all the atoms. The TPE rate is significantly enhanced by a designed photonic cavity, whose many resonances also translate into high-dimensional entanglement. The resulting high-dimensionally entangled photons are entangled in more than one degree of freedom: in all of their spectral components, in addition to the polarization—forming a hyper-entangled state, which is particularly interesting in high information capacity quantum communication. We characterize the photon comb states by analyzing the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference and propose proof-of-concept experiments.

• Research Organization: Krell Institute, Ames, IA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• Grant/Contract Number: FG02-97ER25308
• OSTI ID: 1816720
• Journal Information: Light, Science & Applications, Journal Name: Light, Science & Applications Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 10; ISSN 2047-7538
• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS
atom optics
quantum optics