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Dario A. Fioretto

Publications and source records attributed to Dario A. Fioretto.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

Spin-to-polarization mapping with a coherent quantum dot-cavity receiver

Coherent light-matter interfaces controllably modifying the state of a photon upon interaction with a stationary qubit are a key resource for implementing deterministic entangling gates for optical quantum technologies. This requires a one-to-one mapping between the state of the scattered photon and that of the embedded qubit. Here, we present an experimental signature of such a bijection by leveraging the spin-induced Kerr rotation present in a low-noise charged quantum dot-micropillar cavity device. Through time-resolved polarization measurements, we project the electron spin to one of its eigenstates with $95\pm2\%$ fidelity with a single reflected photon detection, and follow the subsequent spin relaxation through the detection of a second reflected photon. We demonstrate that, after a transient regime governed by the trion radiative lifetime, two orthogonal polarization states can be produced, each associated to a given spin eigenstate. While the current results are limited by a timescale competition between electron spin relaxation and trion radiative lifetime, they could be improved using hole spins displaying increased relaxation times. Our work paves the way towards deterministic logic gates exploiting this one-to-one mapping between a spin and the polarization of a scattered photon.

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Industry-ready spin-photon interfaces for hybrid photonic quantum computing

Hybrid photonic quantum computers, combining stationary matter qubits and flying photonic qubits, offer an intrinsically networked and resource-efficient route to large-scale, error-corrected quantum computation. Their core components are cavity-coupled matter qubits that act as light--matter interfaces, enabling: high-efficiency on-demand single-photon generation, stable near-unity photon indistinguishability and spin--multi-photon entanglement. Semiconductor quantum dots in microcavities are a leading platform for realizing such devices. Yet reaching the performance, reproducibility and spin-coherence thresholds for large-scale error correction remains a major challenge requiring industrial fabrication and control. Here we report thousands of monolithic semiconductor quantum-dot devices fabricated using a III--V pilot production-line process compatible with large-scale deployment. Systematic control of source parameters yields state-of-the-art efficiency and supports a path to optical losses below fault-tolerance thresholds. Using field-quadrature state reconstruction as a stringent joint test of efficiency and indistinguishability, we observe near-unity photon quantum purity stable over tens of minutes and a record single-photon Wigner-function negativity. We further demonstrate seven-partite spin--multi-photon entanglement and spin coherence extendable to microsecond timescales in the low-magnetic-field regime. Finally, photons from distant sources are as indistinguishable as photons emitted successively by a single source. These results establish foundry-compatible III--V quantum dots as a scalable platform for hybrid photonic quantum computing.

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Benchmarking quantum key distribution by mixing single photons and laser light

Quantum key distribution is a key application of quantum mechanics, shaping the future of privacy and secure communications. Many protocols require single photons, often approximated by strongly attenuated laser pulses. Here, we harness the emission of a quantum dot embedded in a micropillar and explore a hybrid approach where the information is encoded on a mixture of single photons and laser pulses. We derive a phenomenological analysis of the configuration where both sources of light are mixed incoherently to perform the BB84 protocol, showing nearly perfect matching between theory and experiment. This provides a flexible technology compensating limited collected brightnesses of single-photon sources as well as a thorough investigation of single-photon statistics advantage scenarios over Poisson-distributed statistics. Explicitly, our model highlights an efficiency threshold for unconditional advantage of single photons over laser along with insights on the interplay between single-photon purity and collected brightness in the performances of BB84.

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Measurement-induced back-action in a QD-based coherent spin-photon interface

Polarization-encoded spin-photon interfaces constitute promising candidates for the development of stationary nodes used as photon receivers, for quantum communication and distributed quantum computing. Here we introduce a time-resolved tomography approach which allows observing the dynamics of an electron spin, in a semiconductor quantum dot, mapped onto the dynamics of the polarization state of reflected photons. Through a single tomography experiment, we infer all the relevant spin dynamics timescales, including precession, decoherence and relaxation times. We also demonstrate and quantify the measurement back-action induced, on the embedded spin qubit, by the detection of a single reflected photon. We show that the induced population and coherence of the spin state can be tuned by the chosen polarization basis of the measurement. The control of the photon-induced back-action on the embedded spin qubit constitutes a crucial requirement for the use of spin-photon interfaces as quantum receivers.

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Monitoring the generation of photonic linear cluster states with partial measurements

Quantum states of light with many entangled photons are key resources for photonic quantum computing and quantum communication. In this work, we exploit a highly resource-efficient generation scheme based on a linear optical circuit embedding a fibered delay loop acting as a quantum memory. The single photons are generated with a bright single-photon source based on a semiconductor quantum dot, allowing to perform the entangling scheme up to 6 photons. We demonstrate $2$, $3$, $4$ and $6$-photon entanglement generation at respective rates of $6$kHz, $120$Hz, $2.2$Hz, and $2$mHz, corresponding to an average scaling ratio of $46$. We introduce a method for real-time control of entanglement generation based on partially post-selected measurements. The visibility of such measurements carries faithful information to monitor the entanglement process, an important feature for the practical implementation of photonic measurement-based quantum computation.

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Optimizing the quantum interference between single photons and local oscillator with photon correlations

The quantum interference between a coherent state and a single photon is an important tool in continuous variable optical quantum technologies to characterize and engineer non-Gaussian quantum states. Semiconductor quantum dots, which have recently emerged as a key platform for efficient single-photon generation, could become interesting assets in this context. An essential parameter for interfering single photons and classical fields is the mean wavepacket overlap between both fields. Here, we report on two homodyne photon-correlation techniques enabling the precise measurement of the overlap between a single photon generated by a quantum dot-cavity device and pulsed laser light. The different statistics of interfering fields lead to specific signatures of the quantum interference on the photon correlations at the output of the interfering beam splitter. We compare the behavior of maximized overlap, measuring either the Hong-Ou-Mandel visibility between both outputs or the photon bunching at a single output. Through careful tailoring of the laser light in various degrees of freedom, we maximize the overlap to $76\,\%$, with limitations primarily due to mismatched spectral and temporal profiles and low-frequency charge noise in the single-photon source.

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A general-purpose single-photon-based quantum computing platform

Quantum computing aims at exploiting quantum phenomena to efficiently perform computations that are unfeasible even for the most powerful classical supercomputers. Among the promising technological approaches, photonic quantum computing offers the advantages of low decoherence, information processing with modest cryogenic requirements, and native integration with classical and quantum networks. To date, quantum computing demonstrations with light have implemented specific tasks with specialized hardware, notably Gaussian Boson Sampling which permitted quantum computational advantage to be reached. Here we report a first user-ready general-purpose quantum computing prototype based on single photons. The device comprises a high-efficiency quantum-dot single-photon source feeding a universal linear optical network on a reconfigurable chip for which hardware errors are compensated by a machine-learned transpilation process. Our full software stack allows remote control of the device to perform computations via logic gates or direct photonic operations. For gate-based computation we benchmark one-, two- and three-qubit gates with state-of-the art fidelities of $99.6\pm0.1 \%$, $93.8\pm0.6 \%$ and $86\pm1.2 \%$ respectively. We also implement a variational quantum eigensolver, which we use to calculate the energy levels of the hydrogen molecule with high accuracy. For photon native computation, we implement a classifier algorithm using a $3$-photon-based quantum neural network and report a first $6$-photon Boson Sampling demonstration on a universal reconfigurable integrated circuit. Finally, we report on a first heralded 3-photon entanglement generation, a key milestone toward measurement-based quantum computing.

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Integrating a fiber cavity into a wheel trap for strong ion-cavity coupling

We present an ion trap with an integrated fiber cavity, designed for strong coupling at the level of single ions and photons. The cavity is aligned to the axis of a miniature linear Paul trap, enabling simultaneous coupling of multiple ions to the cavity field. We simulate how charges on the fiber mirrors affect the trap potential, and we test these predictions with an ion trapped in the cavity. Furthermore, we measure micromotion and heating rates in the setup.

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Heating of a trapped ion induced by dielectric materials

Electric-field noise due to surfaces disturbs the motion of nearby trapped ions, compromising the fidelity of gate operations that are the basis for quantum computing algorithms. We present a method that predicts the effect of dielectric materials on the ion's motion. Such dielectrics are integral components of ion traps. Quantitative agreement is found between a model with no free parameters and measurements of a trapped ion in proximity to dielectric mirrors. We expect that this approach can be used to optimize the design of ion-trap-based quantum computers and network nodes.

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Probing surface charge densities on optical fibers with a trapped ion

We describe a novel method to measure the surface charge densities on optical fibers placed in the vicinity of a trapped ion, where the ion itself acts as the probe. Surface charges distort the trapping potential, and when the fibers are displaced, the ion's equilibrium position and secular motional frequencies are altered. We measure the latter quantities for different positions of the fibers and compare these measurements to simulations in which unknown charge densities on the fibers are adjustable parameters. Values ranging from $-10$ to $+50$ e/$μ$m$^2$ were determined. Our results will benefit the design and simulation of miniaturized experimental systems combining ion traps and integrated optics, for example, in the fields of quantum computation, communication and metrology. Furthermore, our method can be applied to any setup in which a dielectric element can be displaced relative to a trapped charge-sensitive particle.

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Ion-based nondestructive sensor for cavity photon numbers

We dispersively couple a single trapped ion to an optical cavity to extract information about the cavity photon-number distribution in a nondestructive way. The photon-number-dependent AC-Stark shift experienced by the ion is measured via Ramsey spectroscopy. We use these measurements first to obtain the ion-cavity interaction strength. Next, we reconstruct the cavity photon-number distribution for coherent states and for a state with mixed thermal-coherent statistics, finding overlaps above 99% with the calibrated states.

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