Hong-Ou-Mandel interference of single-photon-level pulses stored in independent room-temperature quantum memories (in EN)
Quantum repeater networks require independent absorptive quantum memories capable of storing and retrieving indistinguishable photons to perform high-repetition entanglement swapping operations. The ability to perform these coherent operations at room temperature is of prime importance for the realization of scalable quantum networks. We perform Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between photonic polarization states and single-photon-level pulses stored and retrieved from two sets of independent room-temperature quantum memories. We show that the storage and retrieval of polarization states from quantum memories does not degrade the HOM visibility for few-photon-level polarization states in a dual-rail configuration. For single-photon-level pulses, we measure the HOM visibility with various levels of background in a single polarization, single-rail QM, and investigate its dependence on the signal-to-background ratio. We obtain an HOM visibility of 43%, compared to the 48% no-memory limit of our set-up. These results allow us to estimate a 33% visibility for polarization qubits under the same conditions. These demonstrations lay the groundwork for future applications using large-scale memory-assisted quantum networks.
- Research Organization:
- Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States); US Department of Energy (USDOE), Washington, DC (United States). Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- SC0012704
- OSTI ID:
- 2581841
- Journal Information:
- npj Quantum Information, Journal Name: npj Quantum Information Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 10; ISSN 2056-6387
- Publisher:
- Nature Partner JournalsCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- EN
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