arXiv subjects

Pau Farrera

Publications and source records attributed to Pau Farrera.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Metropolitan entanglement distribution between an atom and a near-visible photon

Entanglement distribution is the overarching purpose of quantum networks. While communication over long distances can use deployed fiber infrastructure, it requires photons in the telecom band. However, advanced quantum network nodes do not operate at such wavelengths. Here we overcome this limitation with two tailor-made low-noise quantum-frequency converters to distribute entanglement between a single atom and a resonant photon over 14km line-of-sight via 24km of a deployed commercial fiber. The photon at wavelength 780nm is first entangled with the atom, then converted to the telecom S-band, and finally back-converted after propagation through the fiber. This link enables a photon transfer efficiency of 1.7% while affecting the atom-photon entanglement fidelity by less than 1%. This brings integration of atomic quantum nodes with existing long-distance fiber networks into reach, enabling novel applications in quantum information processing.

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arXiv2026

Efficient entanglement of three remote single-atom quantum-network nodes

Entanglement distributed over a set of individually addressable qubit nodes is the enabling resource for a plethora of applications ranging from tests of quantum physics to secure and modular quantum information networks. Entanglement between two memory qubits has been realized on various platforms, but extension to more nodes remains rare and formidably challenging. The principal bottleneck is the efficiency of the light-matter interfaces connecting the qubit nodes to their communication channels. Here, we efficiently generate, distribute and store a three-qubit entangled state across three independent laboratories containing single atoms coupled to optical resonators. We sequentially entangle the atoms pairwise, two by heralded photonic entanglement swapping and two by heralded state transfer. We reach a three-qubit entanglement fidelity of 77(1)% and an entanglement lifetime above 200us. The observed qubit correlations violate Mermin's inequality while closing the detection loophole. Our three-qubit entanglement-generation efficiency is 0.16%. This unprecedented efficiency of our scheme establishes a clear route towards multi-node quantum networks.

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arXiv2025

A source of heralded atom-photon entanglement for quantum networking

Communication in quantum networks suffers notoriously from photon loss. Resulting errors can be mitigated with a suitable measurement herald at the receiving node. However, waiting for a herald and communicating the measurement result back to the sender in a repeat-until-success strategy makes the protocol slow and prone to errors from false heralds such as detector dark counts. Here we implement an entanglement herald at the sending node by employing a cascaded two-photon emission of a single atom into two optical fiber cavities: The polarization of one photon is entangled with the spin of the atom, and the second photon heralds entanglement generation. We show that heralding improves the atom-photon entanglement in-fiber efficiency and fidelity to 68(3)% and 87(2)%, respectively. We highlight the potential of our source for noise-limited long-distance quantum communication by extending the range for constant fidelity or, alternatively, increasing the fidelity for a given distance.

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arXiv2025

Two-cavity-mediated photon-pair emission by one atom

Photon-pair sources are widely used in quantum optics and quantum information experiments. Despite their broad deployment, there has not yet been an on-demand implementation with efficient into-fiber photon generation and high single-photon purity. Here we report on such a source based on a single atom with three energy levels in ladder configuration and coupled to two optical fiber cavities. We efficiently generate photon pairs with in-fiber emission efficiency of $η_{\mathrm{pair}}=16(1)\%$ and study their temporal correlation properties. We simulate theoretically a regime with strong atom-cavity coupling and find that photons are directly emitted from the ground state, i.e. without atomic population in any intermediate state. We propose a scenario to observe such a double-vacuum-stimulated effect experimentally.

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arXiv2021

Nondestructive detection of photonic qubits

One of the biggest challenges in experimental quantum information is to keep the fragile superposition state of a qubit alive. Long lifetimes can be achieved for material qubit carriers as memories, at least in principle, but not for propagating photons that are rapidly lost by absorption, diffraction or scattering. The loss problem can be mitigated with a nondestructive photonic qubit detector that heralds the photon without destroying the encoded qubit. Such detector is envisioned to facilitate protocols where distributed tasks depend on the successful dissemination of photonic qubits, to improve loss-sensitive qubit measurements, and to enable certain quantum key distribution attacks. Here we demonstrate such a detector based on a single atom in two crossed fibre-based optical resonators, one for qubit-insensitive atom-photon coupling, the other for atomic-state detection. We achieve a nondestructive detection efficiency upon qubit survival of $(79\pm3)\,\%$, a photon survival probability of $(31\pm1)\,\%$, and preserve the qubit information with a fidelity of $(96.2\pm0.3)\,\%$. To illustrate the potential of our detector we show that it can provide, already with current parameters, an advantage for long-distance entanglement and quantum-state distribution, resource optimization via qubit amplification, and detection-loophole-free Bell tests.

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arXiv2020

Transient dynamics of the quantum light retrieved from Rydberg polaritons

We study the photon statistics of weak coherent pulses propagating through a cold Rydberg atomic ensemble in the regime of Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency. We show experimentally that the value of the second-order autocorrelation function of the transmitted light strongly depends on the position within the pulse and heavily varies during the transients of the pulse. In particular, we show that the falling edge of the transmitted pulse displays much lower values than the rest of the pulse. We derive a theoretical model that quantitatively predicts our results and explains the physical behavior involved. Finally, we use this effect to generate single photons localized within a pulse from the atomic ensemble. We show that by selecting only the last part of the transmitted pulse, the single photons show an antibunching parameter as low as 0.12 and a generation efficiency per trial larger than possible with probabilistic generation schemes with atomic ensembles.

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arXiv2020

Probing the indistinguishability of single photons generated by Rydberg atomic ensembles

We investigate the indistinguishability of single photons retrieved from collective Rydberg excitations in cold atomic ensembles. The Rydberg spin waves are created either by off resonant two-photon excitation to the Rydberg state or by Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency. To assess the indistinguishability of the generated single photons, we perform Hong-Ou-Mandel experiments between the single photons and weak coherent states of light. We analyze the indistinguishability of the single photons as a function of the detection window and for photons generated by off-resonant excitation we infer high value of indistinguishability going from 89% for the full waveform to 98% for small detection windows. In the same way, we also investigate for the first time the indistinguishability of single photons generated by Rydberg EIT, showing values lower than those corresponding to single photons generated by off-resonant excitation. These results are relevant for the use of Rydberg atoms as quantum network nodes.

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arXiv2020

A cold atom temporally multiplexed quantum memory with cavity-enhanced noise suppression

Future quantum repeater architectures, capable of efficiently distributing information encoded in quantum states of light over large distances, will benefit from multiplexed photonic quantum memories. In this work we demonstrate a temporally multiplexed quantum repeater node in a laser-cooled cloud of $^{87}$Rb atoms. We employ the DLCZ protocol where pairs of photons and single collective spin excitations (so called spin waves) are created in several temporal modes using a train of write pulses. To make the spin waves created in different temporal modes distinguishable and enable selective readout, we control the dephasing and rephasing of the spin waves by a magnetic field gradient, which induces a controlled reversible inhomogeneous broadening of the involved atomic hyperfine levels. We demonstrate that by embedding the atomic ensemble inside a low finesse optical cavity, the additional noise generated in multi-mode operation is strongly suppressed. By employing feed forward readout, we demonstrate distinguishable retrieval of up to 10 temporal modes. For each mode, we prove non-classical correlations between the first and second photon. Furthermore, an enhancement in rates of correlated photon pairs is observed as we increase the number of temporal modes stored in the memory. The reported capability is a key element of a quantum repeater architecture based on multiplexed quantum memories.

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arXiv2018

Photonic quantum state transfer between a cold atomic gas and a crystal

Interfacing fundamentally different quantum systems is key to build future hybrid quantum networks. Such heterogeneous networks offer superior capabilities compared to their homogeneous counterparts as they merge individual advantages of disparate quantum nodes in a single network architecture. However, only very few investigations on optical hybrid-interconnections have been carried out due to the high fundamental and technological challenges, which involve e.g. wavelength and bandwidth matching of the interfacing photons. Here we report the first optical quantum interconnection between two disparate matter quantum systems with photon storage capabilities. We show that a quantum state can be faithfully transferred between a cold atomic ensemble and a rare-earth doped crystal via a single photon at telecommunication wavelength, using cascaded quantum frequency conversion. We first demonstrate that quantum correlations between a photon and a single collective spin excitation in the cold atomic ensemble can be transferred onto the solid-state system. We also show that single-photon time-bin qubits generated in the cold atomic ensemble can be converted, stored and retrieved from the crystal with a conditional qubit fidelity of more than $85\%$. Our results open prospects to optically connect quantum nodes with different capabilities and represent an important step towards the realization of large-scale hybrid quantum networks.

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arXiv2018

Storing single photons emitted by a quantum memory on a highly excited Rydberg state

Strong interaction between two single photons is a long standing and important goal in quantum photonics. This would enable a new regime of nonlinear optics and unlock several applications in quantum information science, including photonic quantum gates and deterministic Bell-state measurements. In the context of quantum networks, it would be important to achieve interactions between single photons from independent photon pairs storable in quantum memories. So far, most experiments showing nonlinearities at the single-photon level have used weak classical input light. Here, we demonstrate the storage and retrieval of a paired single photon emitted by an ensemble quantum memory in a strongly nonlinear medium based on highly excited Rydberg atoms. We show that nonclassical correlations between the two photons persist after retrieval from the Rydberg ensemble. Our result is an important step towards deterministic photon-photon interactions, and may enable deterministic Bell-state measurements with multimode quantum memories.

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arXiv2018

Entanglement between a photonic time-bin qubit and a collective atomic spin excitation

Entanglement between light and matter combines the advantage of long distance transmission of photonic qubits with the storage and processing capabilities of atomic qubits. To distribute photonic states efficiently over long distances several schemes to encode qubits have been investigated -- time-bin encoding being particularly promising due to its robustness against decoherence in optical fibers. Here, we demonstrate the generation of entanglement between a photonic time-bin qubit and a single collective atomic spin excitation (spin-wave) in a cold atomic ensemble, followed by the mapping of the atomic qubit onto another photonic qubit. A magnetic field that induces a periodic dephasing and rephasing of the atomic excitation ensures the temporal distinguishability of the two time-bins and plays a central role in the entanglement generation. To analyse the generated quantum state, we use largely imbalanced Mach-Zehnder interferometers to perform projective measurements in different qubit bases and verify the entanglement by violating a CHSH Bell inequality.

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arXiv2016

Non-classical correlations between a C-band telecom photon and a stored spin-wave

Future ground-based quantum information networks will likely use single photons transmitted through optical fibers to entangle individual network nodes. To extend communication distances and overcome limitations due to photon absorption in fibers the concept of quantum repeaters has been proposed. For that purpose, it is required to achieve quantum correlations between the material nodes and photons at telecom wavelengths which can be sent over long distances in optical fibers. Here we demonstrate non-classical correlation between a frequency converted telecom C-band photon and a spin-wave stored in an atomic ensemble quantum memory. The photons emitted from the ensemble and heralding the spin-waves are converted from 780 nm to 1552 nm by means of an all-solid-state integrated waveguide non-linear device. We show ultra-low noise operation of the device enabling a high signal to noise ratio of the converted single photon, leading to a high spin-wave heralding efficiency. The presented work is an enabling step towards the practical entanglement of remote quantum memories and the entanglement of quantum systems operating at different wavelengths.

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arXiv2016

Generation of single photons with highly tunable wave shape from a cold atomic quantum memory

We report on a single photon source with highly tunable photon shape based on a cold ensemble of Rubidium atoms. We follow the DLCZ scheme to implement an emissive quantum memory, which can be operated as a photon pair source with controllable delay. We find that the temporal wave shape of the emitted read photon can be precisely controlled by changing the shape of the driving read pulse. We generate photons with temporal durations varying over three orders of magnitude up to 10 μs without a significant change of the read-out efficiency. We prove the non-classicality of the emitted photons by measuring their antibunching, showing near single photon behavior at low excitation probabilities. We also show that the photons are emitted in a pure state by measuring unconditional autocorrelation functions. Finally, to demonstrate the usability of the source for realistic applications, we create ultra-long single photons with a rising exponential or doubly peaked wave shape which are important for several quantum information tasks.

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arXiv2015

Controlled rephasing of single collective spin excitations in a cold atomic quantum memory

We demonstrate active control of inhomogeneous dephasing and rephasing for single collective atomic spin excitations (spin-waves) created by spontaneous Raman scattering in a quantum memory based on cold $^{87}$Rb atoms. The control is provided by a reversible external magnetic field gradient inducing an inhomogeneous broadening of the atomic hyperfine levels. We demonstrate experimentally that active rephasing preserves the single photon nature of the retrieved photons. Finally, we show that the control of the inhomogeneous dephasing enables the creation of time-separated spin-waves in a single ensemble, followed by a selective readout in time. This is an important step towards the implementation of a functional temporally multiplexed quantum repeater node.

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arXiv2014

A Waveguide Frequency Converter Connecting Rubidium Based Quantum Memories to the Telecom C-Band

The ability to coherently convert the frequency and temporal waveform of single and entangled photons will be crucial to interconnect the various elements of future quantum information networks. Of particular importance in this context is the quantum frequency conversion of photons emitted by material systems able to store quantum information, so called quantum memories. There have been significant efforts to implement quantum frequency conversion using non linear crystals, with non classical light from broadband photon pair sources and solid state emitters. However, so far, solid state quantum frequency conversion has not been achieved with long lived optical quantum memories. Here, we demonstrate an ultra low noise solid state photonic quantum interface suitable for connecting quantum memories based on atomic ensembles to the telecommunication fiber network. The interface is based on an integrated waveguide non linear device. As a proof of principle, we convert heralded single photons at 780nm emitted by a rubidium based quantum memory to the telecommunication wavelength of 1552nm. We demonstrate a significant amount of non classical correlations between the converted photon and the heralding signal.

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