Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Downloads | Hilfe
Q: Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 39: Gruppenbericht Quanteninformation
Q 39.1: Gruppenbericht
Mittwoch, 15. März 2006, 10:40–11:10, HI
Single Photons for QuantumNetworks — •Tatjana Wilk, Simon Webster, Holger Specht, Axel Kuhn, and Gerhard Rempe — Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1, D-85748 Garching
Recently, the storage of a single atom inside a high-finesse optical cavity for an average time of 17 s has been demonstrated [1]. Such atom-cavity systems with the ability to generate single photons [2] can form the nodes in a quantum network, where the photons act as flying qubits and couple or entangle distant nodes [3]. In order to do so the photons need to be mutually coherent and thus indistinguishable. We therefore have developed a new scheme for the generation of polarized single photons in a coupled atom-cavity system. Together with the cavity, a pump laser drives Raman transitions between the mF=±1 Zeeman substates of the F=1 hyperfine ground state of a single 87Rb atom. This allows us to generate a stream of photons with alternating polarization. The mutual coherence of subsequent photons is characterized in a two-photon interference experiment [4], where their suitability for applications in quantum information processing such as linear optical quantum computing [5] is verified.
[1] Nußmann et al. Nature Physics 1, 122 (2005)
[2] Kuhn et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 67901 (2002)
[3] Cabrillo et al. Phys. Rev. A 59, 1025 (1999)
[4] Legero et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 70503 (2004)
[5] Knill et al. Nature 409, 46 (2001)