43,994 research outputs found
State Transfer Between a Mechanical Oscillator and Microwave Fields in the Quantum Regime
Recently, macroscopic mechanical oscillators have been coaxed into a regime
of quantum behavior, by direct refrigeration [1] or a combination of
refrigeration and laser-like cooling [2, 3]. This exciting result has
encouraged notions that mechanical oscillators may perform useful functions in
the processing of quantum information with superconducting circuits [1, 4-7],
either by serving as a quantum memory for the ephemeral state of a microwave
field or by providing a quantum interface between otherwise incompatible
systems [8, 9]. As yet, the transfer of an itinerant state or propagating mode
of a microwave field to and from a mechanical oscillator has not been
demonstrated owing to the inability to agilely turn on and off the interaction
between microwave electricity and mechanical motion. Here we demonstrate that
the state of an itinerant microwave field can be coherently transferred into,
stored in, and retrieved from a mechanical oscillator with amplitudes at the
single quanta level. Crucially, the time to capture and to retrieve the
microwave state is shorter than the quantum state lifetime of the mechanical
oscillator. In this quantum regime, the mechanical oscillator can both store
and transduce quantum information
High efficiency photon counting using stopped light
Single-photon detection and photon counting play a central role in a large
number of quantum communication and computation protocols. While the efficiency
of state-of-the-art photo-detectors is well below the desired limits, quantum
state measurements in trapped ions can be carried out with efficiencies
approaching 100%. Here, we propose a method that can in principle achieve ideal
photon counting, by combining the techniques of photonic quantum memory and
ion-trap fluorescence detection: after mapping the quantum state of a
propagating light pulse onto metastable collective excitations of a trapped
cold atomic gas, it is possible to monitor the resonance fluorescence induced
by an additional laser field that only couples to the metastable excited state.
Even with a photon collection/detection efficiency as low as 10%, it is
possible to achieve photon counting with efficiency approaching 100%.Comment: 4 page
Outcoupling from a Bose-Einstein condensate with squeezed light to produce entangled atom laser beams
We examine the properties of an atom laser produced by outcoupling from a
Bose-Einstein condensate with squeezed light. We model the multimode dynamics
of the output field and show that a significant amount of squeezing can be
transfered from an optical mode to a propagating atom laser beam. We use this
to demonstrate that two-mode squeezing can be used to produce twin atom laser
beams with continuous variable entanglement in amplitude and phase.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figure
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