Single photons and quantum effects articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Spectral super-resolution methods generally apply only to laser spectroscopy. Here, thanks to a Gradient Echo Memory with time-frequency processing capabilities, the authors are able to resolve frequency differences with precision below the Fourier limit for narrowband and ultra-low input-light level.

    • Mateusz Mazelanik
    • , Adam Leszczyński
    •  & Michał Parniak

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Exploiting technologies derived from the optical clocks community, the authors demonstrate a setup for twin-field QKD which extends the coherence times by three orders of magnitude, overcoming the main challenge towards real-world implementation.

    • Cecilia Clivati
    • , Alice Meda
    •  & Davide Calonico

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Single-photon emitters in 2D semiconductors hold promise for quantum applications, but usually operate in the 500-800 nm wavelength range. Here, the authors report site-controlled creation of quantum emitters in the telecommunication wavelength window by coupling 2D MoTe2 to strain inducing nano-pillar arrays.

    • Huan Zhao
    • , Michael T. Pettes
    •  & Han Htoon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Existing schemes for coherent control and measurements in superconducting circuits rely on the coupling between superconducting qubits and cavity photons. Here the authors implement conditional fluorescence readout of a fluxonium qubit placed inside an open waveguide, with no coupling to cavity modes.

    • Nathanaël Cottet
    • , Haonan Xiong
    •  & Vladimir E. Manucharyan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strong light-matter coupling has been realized at the level of single atoms and photons throughout most of the electromagnetic spectrum, except for the THz range. Here, the authors report a THz-scale transport gap, induced by vacuum fluctuations in carbon nanotube quantum dot through the deep strong coupling of a single electron to a THz resonator.

    • F. Valmorra
    • , K. Yoshida
    •  & T. Kontos

  • Article
    | Open Access

    So far, experimental results have favoured the often unstated assumption that quantum statistical properties of multiparticle systems are preserved in plasmonic platforms. Here, the authors show how multiparticle interference in photon-plasmon scattering can modify the excitation mode of plasmonic systems.

    • Chenglong You
    • , Mingyuan Hong
    •  & Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Efficient conversion of microwave photons into electrical current would enable several applications in quantum technologies, especially if one could step outside of the gated-time regime. Here, the authors demonstrate continuous-time microwave photoconversion in double quantum dots with 6% efficiency.

    • Waqar Khan
    • , Patrick P. Potts
    •  & Ville F. Maisi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Accurate control of the spatial location and the emission wavelength of single photon emitters (SPEs) in van der Waals materials is a crucial yet challenging endeavour. Here, the authors use an electron beam to generate SPE ensembles in high purity synthetic hBN with enhanced spatial accuracy and emission reproducibility.

    • Clarisse Fournier
    • , Alexandre Plaud
    •  & Aymeric Delteil

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Room-temperature single photon sources with memory capabilities are promising for quantum information processing, but are currently limited in their memory time or photon purity. Here, the authors report single photon emission with good antibunching from an atomic vapour cell source with 0.68 ms memory time.

    • Karsten B. Dideriksen
    • , Rebecca Schmieg
    •  & Eugene S. Polzik

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rectenna, which consist of a microscale antenna, combined with a rectifying diode, have great potential in energy harvesting, however, achieving high responsivity and low resistance is extremely difficult. Here, the authors demonstrate a metal-insulator-insulator metal diode which overcomes these limitations.

    • Amina Belkadi
    • , Ayendra Weerakkody
    •  & Garret Moddel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Background radiation has been identified as a key factor limiting the coherence times of superconducting circuits. Here, the authors measure the impact of environmental and cosmic radiation on a superconducting resonator with varying degrees of shielding, including an underground facility.

    • L. Cardani
    • , F. Valenti
    •  & I. M. Pop

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Optical nonreciprocity through magneto-optical effects requires bulky apparatuses and strong magnetic fields, while magnetic-free approaches are difficult to implement. Here, the authors use optically-induced magnetisation in an atomic ensemble to get 50 dB of isolation over a large power dynamic range.

    • Xin-Xin Hu
    • , Zhu-Bo Wang
    •  & Chang-Ling Zou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In order to develop perovskite nanocrystals as a single-photon source, there is a need to understand the complex exciton photo-physics. Here, the authors employ resonant and near-resonant excitation technique to study single CsPbI3 nanocrystal that allows them to probe the continuous and size-quantised acoustic-phonon modes.

    • Yan Lv
    • , Chunyang Yin
    •  & Min Xiao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Integrated photonics are promising to scale up quantum optics. Here the authors combine low-power microelectromechanical control and superconducting single-photon detectors on the same chip and demonstrate routing, high-dynamic-range detection, and power stabilization.

    • Samuel Gyger
    • , Julien Zichi
    •  & Carlos Errando-Herranz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Photon antibunching typically measures the time-averaged photophysics of multichromophoric nanoparticles. Here, the authors report on time-resolving photon antibunching, allowing the true number of chromophores and exciton diffusion to be measured in DNA origami and conjugated polymer aggregates.

    • Gordon J. Hedley
    • , Tim Schröder
    •  & Jan Vogelsang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors develop a method to measure the coupling between a single photon source and any arbitrary photonic structure having constant density of electromagnetic states over the linewidth of the emitter. They demonstrate this method by an experiment on a single molecule coupled to an interrupted nanophotonic waveguide.

    • Sebastien Boissier
    • , Ross C. Schofield
    •  & Alex S. Clark

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Generating photonic cluster states using a single non-heralded source and a single entangling gate would optimise scalability and reduce resource overhead. Here, the authors generate up to 4-photon cluster states using a quantum dot coupled to a fibre loop, with a fourfold generation rate of 10 Hz.

    • D. Istrati
    • , Y. Pilnyak
    •  & H. S. Eisenberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Deterministic generation of photonic multi-partite entangled states has previously been achieved for specific states using ad-hoc devices. Here, the authors present a single superconducting circuit device to deterministically generate a variety of states, namely W, GHZ, and cluster states.

    • Jean-Claude Besse
    • , Kevin Reuer
    •  & Christopher Eichler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    GaAs quantum dots emitting at the near-red part of the spectrum usually suffers from excess charge-noise. With a careful design of a n-i-p-diode structure hosting GaAs quantum dots, the authors demonstrate ultralow-noise behaviour and high-fidelity spin initialisation close to rubidium wavelengths.

    • Liang Zhai
    • , Matthias C. Löbl
    •  & Richard J. Warburton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conventional models of high harmonic generation typically do not provide a full quantum description of all phenomena. Here, the authors develop a fully quantum theory for high harmonic generation and use it to study the emission from a quantum system in a strong field.

    • Alexey Gorlach
    • , Ofer Neufeld
    •  & Ido Kaminer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Resonantly-excited quantum-dot-based single photon sources feature very high purity, but also limited efficiency due to the need to suppress the residual pump. Here, the authors demonstrate a workaround, performing optical pumping and signal collection in two orthogonal modes inside a nanophotonic circuit.

    • Ravitej Uppu
    • , Hans T. Eriksen
    •  & Leonardo Midolo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The trade-off between long lifetime and inevitable radiative decay to a control line has become a key limitation for superconducting qubits. Here, the authors break the trade-off by coupling another qubit to the control line of the first one to suppress its relaxation, while enabling fast qubit control.

    • S. Kono
    • , K. Koshino
    •  & Y. Nakamura

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The quantum Cheshire cat effect has already highlighted how, in the quantum realm, a physical property can be temporarily detached from an object. Here, the authors go a step further, experimentally demonstrating how a particle's spin can be permanently separated and exchanged with that of another particle.

    • Zheng-Hao Liu
    • , Wei-Wei Pan
    •  & Guang-Can Guo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Suitability for large-scale quantum computation imposes severe requirements on single-photon sources in terms of purity, indistinguishability and heralding efficiency. Here, the authors boost all these figures of merit through a dual-mode pump-delayed four-wave mixing scheme in low-loss silicon waveguides.

    • S. Paesani
    • , M. Borghi
    •  & A. Laing

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Experimental studies of topological phenomena for interacting quantum systems are challenging. Here, the authors exploit the analogy between a quantum two-body problem in one dimension and a classical two-dimensional problem, emulating two-photon topological bound states in 1D using a 2D electrical circuit.

    • Nikita A. Olekhno
    • , Egor I. Kretov
    •  & Maxim A. Gorlach

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Imagers capable of reconstructing three-dimensional scenes in the presence of strong background noise are desirable for many remote sensing and imaging applications. Here, the authors report an imager operating in photon-starved and noise-polluted environments through quantum parametric mode sorting.

    • Patrick Rehain
    • , Yong Meng Sua
    •  & Yu-Ping Huang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electron-spin to photon-polarisation conversion is a promising technology for achieving free-space or fibre coupled quantum transfer. Here, the authors demonstrate acoustically-driven single photons from single electrons, without the need for self-assembled quantum dots, using a SAW-driven lateral n-i-p junction.

    • Tzu-Kan Hsiao
    • , Antonio Rubino
    •  & Christopher J. B. Ford

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Integration of photonic circuits with single photon emitters provides a promising route towards scalable quantum photonic chips. Here, the authors integrate a WSe2 monolayer onto a SiN chip and demonstrate the coupling of single photon emitters in WSe2 with the guided mode of a SiN waveguide.

    • Frédéric Peyskens
    • , Chitraleema Chakraborty
    •  & Dirk Englund

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reaching a quantum advantage in metrology usually requires hard-to-prepare two-mode entangled states such as NOON states. Here, instead, the authors demonstrate single-mode phase estimation using Fock states superpositions in a superconducting qubit-oscillator system.

    • W. Wang
    • , Y. Wu
    •  & L. Sun

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Vibrational interactions are usually considered an obstacle to the creation and manipulation of quantum states; looking at the paradigmatic example of a driven quantum dot, the authors show how they could actually help to engineer optical states that are impossible to reach in the perfectly isolated case.

    • Jake Iles-Smith
    • , Ahsan Nazir
    •  & Dara P. S. McCutcheon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quantifying entanglement in a large quantum system requires an intractable number of measurements. Here, the authors demonstrate a method for certifying entanglement from extremely undersampled data by combining a new quantitative entanglement witness with an adaptive sampling procedure.

    • James Schneeloch
    • , Christopher C. Tison
    •  & Gregory A. Howland

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Light emitters can be induced in transition metal dichalcogenides by defect engineering, but challenges remain in their controlled spatial positioning. Here, the authors irradiate monolayer MoS2 with a sub-nm focused helium ion beam to deterministically create defects, and obtain spectrally narrow emission lines that produce photons in the visible spectral range

    • J. Klein
    • , M. Lorke
    •  & A. W. Holleitner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Photon collection from quantum emitters is difficult, and their scale requires the use of free-space optical measurement setups which prevent packaging of quantum devices. Here, the authors design and fabricate a metasurface that acts as an immersion lens to collect and collimate the emission of an individual emitter.

    • Tzu-Yung Huang
    • , Richard R. Grote
    •  & Lee C. Bassett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Measurements of motion that avoid quantum backaction, with the potential to surpass the standard quantum limit, have so far been demonstrated using microwave radiation. Here, Shomroni, Qiu et al. demonstrate a backaction-evading measurement of the motion of a nanomechanical beam using laser light.

    • Itay Shomroni
    • , Liu Qiu
    •  & Tobias J. Kippenberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Point defects in solids have potential applications in quantum technologies, but the mechanisms underlying different defects’ performance are not fully established. Nagy et al. show how the wavefunction symmetry of silicon vacancies in SiC leads to promising optical and spin coherence properties.

    • Roland Nagy
    • , Matthias Niethammer
    •  & Jörg Wrachtrup

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Universal cluster states for quantum computing can be assembled without feed-forward by fusing n-photon clusters with linear optics if the fusion success probability is above a threshold p. The authors bound p in terms of n and provide protocols for n = 3 clusters requiring lower fusion probability than before.

    • Mihir Pant
    • , Don Towsley
    •  & Saikat Guha

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Storage-free quantum repeaters represent a viable alternative to quantum-memory-based ones. Here, the authors propose a modified scheme for Bell state measurements which reduces the necessary resources for realising such an all-photonic repeater, and show a proof-of-principle implementation.

    • Yasushi Hasegawa
    • , Rikizo Ikuta
    •  & Nobuyuki Imoto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The observation of magnetic field dependence of defects hosted in hBN has been elusive so far. Here, the authors perform an investigation of spin-related effects in the optical emission from hBN defects, and observe a magnetic field dependence in the intensity of the photoluminescence spectrum.

    • Annemarie L. Exarhos
    • , David A. Hopper
    •  & Lee C. Bassett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Description of a qubit following an open time-like curve usually incurs into conceptual problems such as violation of entanglement monogamy. Here, the authors show how to use the formalism of pseudo-density operators to describe such a process, showing a proof-of-principle experimental simulation.

    • Chiara Marletto
    • , Vlatko Vedral
    •  & Marco Genovese

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