Annihilating and creating a photon in a travelling light field are useful building blocks for quantum-state engineering to generate a photonic state at will. In this paper, we review the relevance of these operations to some of the fundamental aspects of quantum physics and recent advances in this research.
We systematically study the indirect interaction between a magnon mode and a cavity photon mode mediated by travelling photons of a waveguide. From a general Hamiltonian, we derive the effective coupling strength between two separated modes, and obtain the theoretical expression of system's transmission. Accordingly, we design an experimental set-up consisting of a shield cavity photon mode, microstrip line and a magnon system to test our theoretical predictions. From measured transmission spectra, indirect interaction, as well as mode hybridization, between two modes can be observed. All expe…
We demonstrate strong coupling between travelling magnons in an Yttrium Iron Garnet film and 3D microwave cavity photons at milli-Kelvin temperatures. The coupling strength of $350$MHz or $7.3$\% of resonance frequency is observed. The magnonic subsystem is represented by the Damon-Eshbach magnetostatic surface wave with a distribution of wave numbers giving the linewidth of 15MHz. The ways to improve this parameter are discussed. The energy gap in the spectrum given by the Zeeman energy and the shape-anisotropy energy in the film geometry give rise to a significant asymmetry of the double pea…
Experimental results are presented on the efficiency limits for a quantum interface between a matter-based qubit and a photonic qubit. Using a trapped ion in an optical cavity, we obtain a single ion-entangled photon at the cavity output with a probability of 0.69(3). The performance of our system is shown to saturate the upper limit to photon-collection probability from a quantum emitter in a cavity, set by the emitter's electronic structure and by the cavity parameters. The probability for generating and detecting the ion-entangled fiber-coupled photon is 0.462(3), a five-fold increase over …
We report on the design, fabrication and measurement of travelling-wave superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) integrated with polycrystalline diamond photonic circuits. We analyze their performance both in the near-infrared wavelength regime around 1600 nm and at 765 nm. Near-IR detection is important for compatibility with the telecommunication infrastructure, while operation in the visible wavelength range is relevant for compatibility with the emission line of silicon vacancy centers in diamond which can be used as efficient single-photon sources. Our detectors feature h…
General relativity predicts the existence of closed timelike curves (CTCs), along which an object could travel to its own past. A consequence of CTCs is the failure of determinism, even for classical systems: one initial condition can result in multiple evolutions. Here we introduce a new quantum formulation of a classic example, where a billiard ball can travel along two possible trajectories: one unperturbed and one, along a CTC, where it collides with its past self. Our model includes a vacuum state, allowing the ball to be present or absent on each trajectory, and a clock, which provides a…
Photonics offers a route to fast and distributed quantum computing in ambient conditions, provided that photon sources and logic gates can be operated deterministically. Quantum memories, capable of storing and re-emitting photons on demand, enable quasi-deterministic operations by synchronising stochastic events. We recently interfaced a Raman-type quantum memory with a travelling-wave heralded photon source. Here we discuss the trade-space for the spectral characteristics of such sources, and we present measurements of our source, which represents a practical compromise enabling passive stab…
A quantum model for Josephson-based metamaterials working in the Three-Wave Mixing (3WM) and Four-Wave Mixing (4WM) regimes at the single-photon level is presented. The transmission line taken into account, namely Traveling Wave Josephson Parametric Amplifier (TWJPA), is a bipole composed by a chain of rf-SQUIDs which can be biased by a DC current or a magnetic field in order to activate the 3WM or 4WM nonlinearities. The model exploits a Hamiltonian approach to analytically determine the time evolution of the system both in the Heisenberg and interaction pictures. The former returns the analy…
It is now well-established that photonic systems can exhibit topological energy bands; similar to their electronic counterparts, this leads to the formation of chiral edge modes which can be used to transmit light in a manner that is protected against back-scattering. While it is understood how classical signals can propagate under these conditions, it is an outstanding important question how the quantum vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field get modified in the presence of a topological band structure. We address this challenge by exploring a setting where a non-zero topological inv…
The read-out of a microwave qubit state occurs using an amplification chain that enlarges the quantum state to a signal detectable with a classical measurement apparatus. However, at what point in this process is the quantum state really 'measured'? In order to investigate whether the `measurement' takes place in the amplification chain, in which a parametric amplifier is often chosen as the first amplifier, it is proposed to construct a microwave interferometer that has such an amplifier added to each of its arms. Feeding the interferometer with single photons, the interference visibility dep…
We have performed a quantum mechanical analysis of travelling-wave parametric amplifiers (TWPAs) in order to investigate five experimental phenomena related to their operations, namely the effect of impedance mismatch, the presence of upper idler modes, the presence of quantum and thermal noise, the generation of squeezed states, and the preservation of pre-squeezed states during amplification. Our analysis uses momentum operators to describe the spatial evolution of quantised modes along a TWPA. We calculate the restriction placed on pump amplitude as well as amplifier gain as a result of imp…
Noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers are expected to execute quantum circuits of up to a few hundred qubits. The circuits have to conform to NISQ architectural constraints regarding qubit allocation and the execution of multi-qubit gates. Quantum circuit compilation (QCC) takes a nonconforming circuit and outputs a compatible circuit. Can classical optimisation methods be used for QCC? Compilation is a known combinatorial problem shown to be solvable by two types of operations: 1) qubit allocation, and 2) gate scheduling. We show informally that the two operations form a discrete…
We present a fully passive method for implementing a quantum phase gate between two photons travelling in a one-dimensional wave guide. The gate is based on chirally coupled emitters in a three-level $V$ configuration, which only interact through the photon field without any external control fields. We describe the (non-)linear scattering of the emerging polariton states and show that for near resonant photons the scattering dynamics directly implements a perfect control phase gate between the incoming photons in the limit of many emitters. For a finite number of emitters we show that the domi…
We study the space-time structure of the scattered field induced by the scattering of a narrow single-photon Gaussian pulse on a qubit embedded in 1D open waveguide. For a weak excitation power we obtain explicit analytical expressions for space and time dependence of reflected and transmitted fields which are, in general, are different from plain travelling waves. The scattered field consists of two parts: a damping part which represent a spontaneous decay of the excited qubit and a coherent, lossless part. We show that for large distance $x$ from qubit and at times $t$ long after the scatter…
Here, we numerically simulate probabilistic elementary entangling operations between rail-encoded photons for the purpose of scalable universal quantum computation or communication. We propose grouping logical qubits into single-photon blocks wherein single-qubit rotations and the CNOT gate are fully deterministic and simple to implement. Inter-block communication is then allowed through said probabilistic entangling operations. We find a promising trend in the increasing probability of successful inter-block communication as we increase the number of optical modes operated on by our elementar…
The conventional photon subtraction and photon addition transformations, $\varrho \rightarrow t a \varrho a^†$ and $\varrho \rightarrow t a^† \varrho a$, are not valid quantum operations for any constant $t>0$ since these transformations are not trace nonincreasing. For a fixed density operator $\varrho$ there exist fair quantum operations, ${\cal N}_{-}$ and ${\cal N}_{+}$, whose conditional output states approximate the normalized outputs of former transformations with an arbitrary accuracy. However, the uniform convergence for some classes of density operators $\varrho$ has remained essenti…
In our work, we compare three teleportation protocols: the original protocol, the photon subtraction protocol, and the protocol with a cubic phase gate. We evaluate the fidelity of each protocol using the example of teleportation of the squeezed state and the Schrodinger's cat state. We show that, under equal conditions, the teleportation scheme with a cubic phase gate achieves significantly higher fidelity than the other protocols considered.
Processing multi-photon state through operation on single photon: methods and applications
多光子态在量子信息技术中有着广泛的应用。利用本文提出的方法，可以将多个单光子量子比特乘积形式的多光子态的结构映射到一个单光子量子比特上，这个单光子量子比特也可以与其他光子形成可分离的乘积。这使得以处理单光子态的方式来处理这样的多光子态成为可能。未知量子比特鉴别的光学实现[B.他，J.A. Bergou和Y.- H. Ren，Phys.Rev.A76，032301（2007）]的方法进行了简化。另一个应用是量子逻辑门的构造，其中也需要逆变换回到输入状态空间。我们特别指出，修改后的设置来实现的转换可以实现确定性的多控制门（包括Toffoli门）直接操作的产品的单光子量子比特。
The bosonic nature of light leads to counter-intuitive bunching effects. We describe an experimentally testable effect in which a single photon is induced through a highly reflecting beamsplitter by a large amplitude coherent state, with probability 1/e in the limit of large coherent state amplitude. We use this effect to construct a viable implementation of the bare raising operator on coherent states via conditional measurement, which succeeds with high probability and fidelity even in the high amplitude limit.
It has been found that non-Gaussian operations can be applied to increase and distill entanglement between Gaussian entangled states. We show the successful use of the non-Gaussian operation, in particular, photon subtraction operation, on the continuous-variable measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (CV-MDI-QKD) protocol. The proposed method can be implemented based on existing technologies. Security analysis shows that the photon subtraction operation can remarkably increase the maximal transmission distance of the CV-MDI-QKD protocol, which precisely make up for the shortc…
On quantum logic operations based on photon-exchange interactions in an ensemble of non-interacting atoms
最近提出的通过原子系综中的交换相互作用在光子态之间产生纠缠的想法（J.D. Franson和T. B. Pitman，Phys.Rev.A60，917（1999）和J.D. Franson等人，（quant-ph/9912121））使用S-matix方法进行讨论。结果表明，如果原子的非线性响应可以忽略，并且没有额外的原子-原子相互作用，交换作用在使原子返回到初始态的过程中不会产生光子态之间的纠缠.纠缠的产生需要存在非线性原子响应或原子-原子相互作用。
The probabilistic nature of single-photon sources and photon-photon interactions encourages encoding as much quantum information as possible in every photon for the purpose of photonic quantum information processing. Here, by encoding high-dimensional units of information (qudits) in time and frequency degrees of freedom using on-chip sources, we report deterministic two-qudit gates in a single photon with fidelities exceeding 0.90 in the computational basis. Constructing a two-qudit modulo SUM gate, we generate and measure a single-photon state with non-separability between time and frequency…
Non-Gaussian states and operations are crucial for various continuous-variable quantum information processing tasks. To quantitatively understand non-Gaussianity beyond states, we establish a resource theory for non-Gaussian operations. In our framework, we consider Gaussian operations as free operations, and non-Gaussian operations as resources. We define entanglement-assisted non-Gaussianity generating power and show that it is a monotone that is non-increasing under the set of free super-operations, i.e., concatenation and tensoring with Gaussian channels. For conditional unitary maps, this…
