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High-fidelity transfer and storage of photon states in a single nuclear spin

Nature Photonics volume 10, pages 507–511 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Long-distance quantum communication requires photons and quantum nodes that comprise qubits for interaction with light and good memory capabilities, as well as processing qubits for the storage and manipulation of photons. Owing to the unavoidable photon losses, robust quantum communication over lossy transmission channels requires quantum repeater networks1,2. A necessary and highly demanding prerequisite for these networks is the existence of quantum memories with long coherence times to reliably store the incident photon states. Here we demonstrate the high-fidelity (∼98%) coherent transfer of a photon polarization state to a single solid-state nuclear spin that has a coherence time of over 10 s. The storage process is achieved by coherently transferring the polarization state of a photon to an entangled electron–nuclear spin state of a nitrogen–vacancy centre in diamond. The nuclear spin-based optical quantum memory demonstrated here paves the way towards an absorption-based quantum repeater network.

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Figure 1: Quantum interface connecting light to a single nuclear spin in an NV centre.
Figure 2: Nuclear spin readout.
Figure 3: Full phase-space measurement.
Figure 4: Coherence of the nuclear spin memory.

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Acknowledgements

We thank H. Fedder, I. Gerhardt, I. Jakobi, K. Kafenda and K. Xia for technical support, M. Doherty, J. Greiner, D. Hunger, R. Liu, F. Shi, P. Siyushev and N. Zhao for fruitful discussions. M.M. and D.J.T. acknowledge finical support from The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) SPARQC program. H.K. acknowledges financial support from the the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) Quantum Repeater Project. J.W. acknowledges financial support from the European Research Council (ERC) project SQUTEC, DIAMANT, SIQS and QESSENCE, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) SFB/TR21, JST-DFG (FOR1482), as well as the Volkswagenstiftung.

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Author notes

  1. Sen Yang and Ya Wang: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 3. Physikalisches Institut and Research Center SCOPE, University of Stuttgart, Pfaffenwaldring 57, Stuttgart, 70569, Germany

    Sen Yang, Ya Wang, D. D. Bhaktavatsala Rao, Thai Hien Tran, Ali S. Momenzadeh, Rainer Stöhr, Philipp Neumann & Jörg Wrachtrup

  2. Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Heisenbergstraße, Stuttgart, 1 70569, Germany

    D. D. Bhaktavatsala Rao & Jörg Wrachtrup

  3. Global Innovation Centre, Element Six Ltd, Fermi Avenue, Harwell Oxford, Didcot, OX11 0QR, Oxfordshire, UK

    M. Markham

  4. Element Six Technologies US Corporation, 3901 Burton Drive, Santa Clara, 95054, California, USA

    D. J. Twitchen

  5. Beijing Computational Science Research Center, Beijing, 100084, China

    Ping Wang & Wen Yang

  6. Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, N2L 3G1, Canada

    Rainer Stöhr

  7. Department of Physics, Faculty of Engineering, Yokohama National University, Tokiwadai, Hodogayaku, Yokohama, 240-8501, Japan

    Hideo Kosaka

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  1. Sen Yang
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Contributions

H.K. conceived the original idea, S.Y., Y.W. and P.N. designed the experiment, S.Y. and T.H.T. performed the experiment, S.Y., Y.W. and D.D.B. analysed data and wrote the paper, J.W. supervised the project and all authors commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Sen Yang or Jörg Wrachtrup.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Yang, S., Wang, Y., Rao, D. et al. High-fidelity transfer and storage of photon states in a single nuclear spin. Nature Photon 10, 507–511 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2016.103

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