Development of semiconductor light sources for photonic-enabled quantum communication

Quantum information technologies have attracted tremendous attentions and development efforts by worldwide research organizations and governments in the past decades. It comprises the generation, manipulation, and transfer of quantum bits `qubits' based on the laws of quantum mechanics, enabling the applications of quantum metrology, quantum computation, quantum communication, etc. As one of the frontier quantum technologies, quantum communication features unconditionally secure data transfer between parties over long distance in theory, which can be accomplished through quantum state of light photons, due to their weak interaction with the environment and their remaining coherence over long distance. Meanwhile, quantum repeaters, similar as amplifier in classical communication are believed to be indispensable components to address the photon absorption and decoherence in noisy quantum channels, which scales exponentially with the distance. Quantum repeaters generally consist of three basic elements, namely entanglement swapping, entanglement purification, and quantum memories. In spite of significant breakthroughs achieved with a variety of optical protocols theoretically and experimentally, lack of near-perfect deterministic light sources with fast repetition rates, high degree of single photon purity, indistinguishability, and entanglement still impedes the practical applications. Semiconductor quantum dots are one of the leading system that have exhibited their potential for on-demand generation of high-quality single and entangled photon pairs for above applications. In this work, epitaxially grown III-V semiconductor quantum dots are investigated for driving their application in future quantum networks. First, an individual quantum dot emitting two pairs of entangled photons under pulsed two-photon resonant excitation has been utilized for realization of entanglement swapping, with the swapped photon pairs yielding a fidelity of 0.81 ± 0.04 to the Bell state Ψ+. To explore the practical limits of future quantum networks featuring multiple semiconductor based sources, we scrutinize the consequences of device fabrication, dynamic tuning techniques, time evolution of entanglement, and statistical effects on two separated quantum dot devices adapted in an entanglement swapping scheme. A numerical model based on the observed experimental data is proposed, serving not only as a benchmark for scalability of quantum dot devices, but also laying a roadmap for optimization of solid-state quantum emitters in quantum networks. For real-world quantum applications envisioned with quantum dots, the brightness of the quantum light sources is one of the key enabling factors, which is determined by the source excitation and extraction efficiency, as well as system detection system efficiency. Usually, the primary issue restricting the extraction of photons from III-V semiconductor quantum dots is the high-refractive index material of the host matrix which causes at the semiconductor-vacuum interface. To improve the photon extraction efficiency, a simple and efficient structure based on the principle of optical antennas is developed, resulting in an observed extraction of 17% of single photons in the telecom O-band, and a broadband enhancement of up to 180 times compared to the as-grown sample. A further limiting factor in the source efficiency is caused by the presence of charges in the solid-state environment. Charge fluctuation occur that quench radiative emission processes in resonant excitation schemes and induce fluorescence intermittence (blinking) that deteriorates the quantum yield. The photo-neutralization of GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dots excited by two-photon resonant pumping is investigated. Applying weak gate laser light to the quantum dot allows for controlling the charges capture processes. By adjusting the gate laser power and wavelength, an increase in excitation efficiency of 30% is observed compared to the two-photon resonant excitation without optical gating. The transition rates between the neutral and charged ground state are investigated by means of auto-/cross- correlation measurements. Furthermore, by studying a series of surface-passivated samples with different dot-to-surface distance as close to 20 nm, ODT was found to be an effective compound to neutralize the surface states, leading to reduced formation of non-radiative transition channels. It is anticipated that such a passivation method paves the way of near-field coupling related nano-photonic devices, or elimination of surface states for well-preserved emission properties towards the development of uncapped structure, fundamentally getting rid of total internal reflection to the maximum extent.European Research Council (ERC)/Starting Grant/QD-NOMS/E

How far can one send a photon?

The answer to the question {\it How far can one send a photon?} depends heavily on what one means by {\it a photon} and on what one intends to do with that photon. For direct quantum communication the limit is of about 500 km. For terrestrial quantum communication, near future technologies based on quantum teleportation and quantum memories will soon enable quantum repeaters that will turn the development of a world-wide-quantum-web (WWQW) into a (highly non-trivial) engineering problem. For Device Independent Quantum Information Processing, near future qubit amplifiers (i.e. probabilistic heralded amplification of the probability amplitude of presence of photonic qubits) will soon allow demonstrations over a few tens of km.Comment: Proceedings of QCMC 2014, Hefei. 6 pages Correction of an annoying typ

Heralded photon amplification for quantum communication

Heralded noiseless amplification based on single-photon sources and linear optics is ideally suited for long-distance quantum communication tasks based on discrete variables. We experimentally demonstrate such an amplifier, operating at telecommunication wavelengths. Coherent amplification is performed with a gain of G=1.98+/-0.2, for a state with a maximum expected gain G=2. We also demonstrate that there is no need for a stable phase reference between the initial signal state and the local auxiliary photons used by the amplifier. These results highlight the potential of heralded quantum amplifiers for long-distance quantum communication, and bring device-independent quantum key distribution one step closer.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Improvement of two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution using optical amplifiers

The imperfections of a receiver's detector affect the performance of two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution protocols and are difficult to adjust in practical situations. We propose a method to improve the performance of two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution by adding a parameter-adjustable optical amplifier at the receiver. A security analysis is derived against a two-mode collective entangling cloner attack. Our simulations show that the proposed method can improve the performance of protocols as long as the inherent noise of the amplifier is lower than a critical value, defined as the tolerable amplifier noise. Furthermore, the optimal performance can approach the scenario where a perfect detector is used.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Quantum repeaters based on heralded qubit amplifiers

We present a quantum repeater scheme based on the recently proposed qubit amplifier [N. Gisin, S. Pironio and N. Sangouard, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 070501 (2010)]. It relies on a on-demand entangled-photon pair source which uses on-demand single-photon sources, linear optical elements and atomic ensembles. Interestingly, the imperfections affecting the states created from this source, caused e.g. by detectors with non-unit efficiencies, are systematically purified from an entanglement swapping operation based on a two-photon detection. This allows the distribution of entanglement over very long distances with a high fidelity, i.e. without vacuum components and multiphoton errors. Therefore, the resulting quantum repeater architecture does not necessitate final postselections and thus achieves high entanglement distribution rates. This also provides unique opportunities for device-independent quantum key distribution over long distances with linear optics and atomic ensembles.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure