Temporally and spectrally multiplexed single photon source using quantum feedback control for scalable photonic quantum technologies

Current proposals for scalable photonic quantum technologies require on-demand sources of indistinguishable single photons with very high efficiency (having unheralded loss below $1\%$). Even with recent progress in the field there is still a significant gap between the requirements and state of the art performance. Here, we propose an on-chip source of multiplexed, heralded photons. Using quantum feedback control on a photon storage cavity with an optimized driving protocol, we estimate an on-demand efficiency of $99\%$ and unheralded loss of order $1\%$, assuming high efficiency detectors and intrinsic cavity quality factors of order $10^8$. We further explain how temporal- and frequency-multiplexing can be used in parallel to significantly reduce device requirements if single photon frequency conversion is possible with efficiency in the same range of $99\%$

Percolation based architecture for cluster state creation using photon-mediated entanglement between atomic memories

A central challenge for many quantum technologies concerns the generation of large entangled states of individually addressable quantum memories. Here, we show that percolation theory allows the rapid production of arbitrarily large graph states by heralded photonic entanglement in a lattice of atomic memories. This approach can greatly reduce the time required to produce large cluster resource states for quantum information processing, including states required for universal one-way quantum computing. This reduction puts our architecture in an operational regime where demonstrated collection, coupling and detection efficiencies are sufficient for generating resource states for universal quantum computing within an experimentally demonstrated coherence time. The approach also dispenses the need for time consuming feed-forward, high-cooperativity interfaces and ancilla single photons, and can also tolerate a high rate of site imperfections. We also derive the minimum coherence time for the atomic memory to scalably create large-scale photonic-entanglement without feed-forward as a function of collection efficiency, setting a critical benchmark for future experimental demonstrations. We also propose a variant of the architecture with long-range connections that makes our architecture even more resilient to low site yields. We analyze our architecture for nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, though the approach applies to any atomic or atom-like system.Comment: Supplementary information is available as an ancillary fil

Entanglement generation in a quantum network at distance-independent rate

We develop a protocol for entanglement generation in the quantum internet that allows a repeater node to use $n$-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) projective measurements that can fuse $n$ successfully-entangled {\em links}, i.e., two-qubit entangled Bell pairs shared across $n$ network edges, incident at that node. Implementing $n$-fusion, for $n \ge 3$, is in principle not much harder than $2$-fusions (Bell-basis measurements) in solid-state qubit memories. If we allow even $3$-fusions at the nodes, we find---by developing a connection to a modified version of the site-bond percolation problem---that despite lossy (hence probabilistic) link-level entanglement generation, and probabilistic success of the fusion measurements at nodes, one can generate entanglement between end parties Alice and Bob at a rate that stays constant as the distance between them increases. We prove that this powerful network property is not possible to attain with any quantum networking protocol built with Bell measurements and multiplexing alone. We also design a two-party quantum key distribution protocol that converts the entangled states shared between two nodes into a shared secret, at a key generation rate that is independent of the distance between the two parties

Architectures for photon-mediated quantum information processing

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 173-186).In this thesis, I present architectures for quantum information processing where photons are used as the quantum bit (qubit) or for mediating entanglement between other qubits. The emphasis of this research is to simplify the basic building blocks required in such processors. The all-photonic repeater and computing architectures do not require material nonlinearities, and their resource requirements are reduced by several orders of magnitude. The photon-mediated atomic memory architecture is designed to work with faulty memories and experimentally demonstrated values of coherence time and photonic coupling efficiency. In the quantum network architecture, the only operation at every node is probabilistic Bell measurement.by Mihir Pant.Ph. D

High-dimensional unitary transformations and boson sampling on temporal modes using dispersive optics

A major challenge for postclassical boson sampling experiments is the need for a large number of coupled optical modes, detectors, and single-photon sources. Here we show that these requirements can be greatly eased by time-bin encoding and dispersive optics-based unitary transformations. Detecting consecutively heralded photons after time-independent dispersion performs boson sampling from unitaries for which an efficient classical algorithm is lacking. We also show that time-dependent dispersion can implement general single-particle unitary operations. More generally, this scheme promises an efficient architecture for a range of other linear optics experiments.United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (Grant FA9550-14-1-0052

Single Photon Detection by Cavity-Assisted All-Optical Gain

We consider the free carrier dispersion effect in a semiconductor nanocavity in the limit of discrete photoexcited electron-hole pairs. This analysis reveals the possibility of ultrafast, incoherent transduction and gain from a single photon signal to a strong coherent probe field. Homodyne detection of the displaced probe field enables a new method for room temperature, photon-number-resolving single photon detection. In particular, we estimate that a single photon absorbed within a silicon nanocavity can, within tens of picoseconds, be detected with $\sim 99\%$ efficiency and a dark count rate on the order of kHz assuming a mode volume $V_\text{eff}\sim 10^{-2}(\lambda/n_\text{Si})^3$ for a 4.5 micron probe wavelength and a loaded quality factor $Q$ on the order of $10^4$.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 1 table (main text); 14 pages, 12 figures (supplementary

Increasing error tolerance in quantum computers with dynamic bias arrangement

Many quantum operations are expected to exhibit bias in the structure of their errors. Recent works have shown that a fixed bias can be exploited to improve error tolerance by statically arranging the errors in beneficial configurations. In some cases an error bias can be dynamically reconfigurable, an example being linear optical fusion where the basis of a fusion failure can be chosen before the measurement is made. Here we introduce methods for increasing error tolerance in this setting by using classical decision-making to adaptively choose the bias in measurements as a fault tolerance protocol proceeds. We study this technique in the setting of linear optical fusion based quantum computing (FBQC). We provide examples demonstrating that by dynamically arranging erasures, the loss tolerance can be tripled when compared to a static arrangement of biased errors while using the same quantum resources: we show that for the best FBQC architecture of Bartolucci et al. (2023) the threshold increases from $2.7\%$ to $7.5\%$ per photon with the same resource state by using dynamic biasing. Our method does not require any specific code structure beyond having a syndrome graph representation. We have chosen to illustrate these techniques using an architecture which is otherwise identical to that in Bartolucci et al. (2023), but deployed together with other techniques, such as different fusion networks, higher loss thresholds are possible