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Quantum metasurfaces with atom arrays

Nature Physics volume 16, pages 676–681 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Metasurfaces mould the flow of classical light waves by engineering subwavelength patterns from dielectric or metallic thin films. We introduce and analyse a method in which quantum operator-valued reflectivity can be used to control both the spatiotemporal and quantum properties of transmitted and reflected light. Such quantum metasurfaces are realized by entangling the macroscopic response of atomically thin atom arrays to light. We show that such a system allows for parallel quantum operations between atoms and photons as well as for the generation of highly entangled photonic states such as photonic Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger and three-dimensional cluster states suitable for quantum information processing. We analyse the influence of imperfections as well as specific implementations based on atom arrays excited into Rydberg states.

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Fig. 1: Preparing cat states with quantum metasurfaces.
Fig. 2: Quantum information with quantum metasurfaces.
Fig. 3: QLM for highly entangled free-space photons.
Fig. 4: Error estimation from an experimental considerations.

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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Oren and A. Omran for helpful discussions. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Center for Ultracold Atoms, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research via the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative and the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. R.B., I.P. and H.P. are supported by the NSF through a grant for the Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. I.P. also acknowledges funding by Society in Science, The Branco Weiss Fellowship, administered by the ETH Zurich.

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Author notes

  1. E. Shahmoon

    Present address: Department of Chemical & Biological Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ITAMP, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA

    R. Bekenstein, I. Pikovski & H. Pichler

  2. Physics Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    R. Bekenstein, I. Pikovski, H. Pichler, E. Shahmoon, S. F. Yelin & M. D. Lukin

  3. Department of Physics, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA

    I. Pikovski

  4. The Oskar Klein Centre, Department of Physics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    I. Pikovski

  5. Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    S. F. Yelin

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The theoretical analysis and numerical analysis were carried out by R.B. All authors contributed to the development of theoretical tools, discussed the results and contributed to the manuscript. The manuscript was written by R.B., H.P. and M.D.L.

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Correspondence to R. Bekenstein.

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Supplementary analysis, Fig. 1 and discussion.

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Bekenstein, R., Pikovski, I., Pichler, H. et al. Quantum metasurfaces with atom arrays. Nat. Phys. 16, 676–681 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0845-5

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