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A photon–photon quantum gate based on Rydberg interactions

Nature Physics volume 15, pages 124–126 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

The interaction between Rydberg states of neutral atoms is strong and long-range, making it appealing to put it to use in the context of quantum technologies. Recently, first applications of this idea have been reported in the fields of quantum computation1 and quantum simulation2,3,4. Furthermore, electromagnetically induced transparency allows one to map these Rydberg interactions to light5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15. Here we exploit this mapping and the resulting interaction between photons to realize a photon–photon quantum gate16,17, demonstrating the potential of Rydberg systems as a platform also for quantum communication and quantum networking18. We measure a controlled-NOT truth table with a fidelity of 70(8)% and an entangling-gate fidelity of 63.7(4.5)%, both post-selected upon detection of a control and a target photon. The level of control reached here is an encouraging step towards exploring novel many-body states of photons or for future applications in quantum communication and quantum networking18.

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Fig. 1: Atomic level schemes.
Fig. 2: Simplified scheme of the experimental set-up.
Fig. 3: Performance of the photon-photon gate.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through Nanosystems Initiative Munich.

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  1. Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Garching, Germany

    Daniel Tiarks, Steffen Schmidt-Eberle, Thomas Stolz, Gerhard Rempe & Stephan Dürr

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  1. Daniel Tiarks
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  2. Steffen Schmidt-Eberle
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  3. Thomas Stolz
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  4. Gerhard Rempe
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All authors contributed extensively to the work presented here.

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Correspondence to Stephan Dürr.

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Tiarks, D., Schmidt-Eberle, S., Stolz, T. et al. A photon–photon quantum gate based on Rydberg interactions. Nature Phys 15, 124–126 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0313-7

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