We present a protocol that allows the generation of a maximally entangled state between individual atoms held in spatially separate cavities. Assuming perfect detectors and neglecting spontaneous emission from the atoms, the resulting idealized scheme is deterministic. Under more realistic conditions, when the the atom-cavity interaction departs from the strong coupling regime, and considering imperfect detectors, we show that the scheme is robust against experimental inefficiencies and yields probabilistic entanglement of very high fidelity.
The principle of superposition is a key ingredient for quantum mechanics. A recent work [M. Oszmaniec et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 110403 (2016)] has shown that a quantum adder that deterministically generates a superposition of two unknown states is forbidden. Here we propose a probabilistic approach for creating a superposition state of two arbitrary states encoded in two three-dimensional cavities. Our implementation is based on a three-level superconducting transmon qubit dispersively coupled to two cavities. Numerical simulations show that high-fidelity generation of the superposition of…
We study the creation of photons in resonant cylindrical cavities with time dependent length. The physical degrees of freedom of the electromagnetic field are described using Hertz potentials. We describe the general formalism for cavities with arbitrary section. Then we compute explicitly the number of TE and TM motion-induced photons for cylindrical cavities with rectangular and circular sections. We also discuss the creation of TEM photons in non-simply connected cylindrical cavities.
In this work we present a very simple approach to input-output relations in optical cavities, limiting ourselves to one- and two-photon states of the field. After field quantization, we derive the non-unitary transformation between {\em Inside} and {\em Outside} annihilation and creation operators. Then we express the most general two-photon state generated by {\em Inside} creation operators, through base states generated by {\em Outside} creation operators. After renormalization of coefficients of inside two-photon state, we calculate the outside photon-number probability distribution in a ge…
Distribution of the entangled state of trapped atomic ions to long distance using quantum repeater protocol is considered. Indeed, the long distance is divided into short parts, and then using entanglement generation and entanglement swapping techniques in optomechanical cavities, the entanglement is distributed. To do the task, we perform interaction between trapped atomic ions in optomechanical cavities, operate proper measurements on trapped ions and also make Bell state measurement as a well-known way to swap the entanglement. Accordingly, the entanglement is distributed between target ion…
Trapped ions are among the most promising platforms for quantum technologies. They are at the heart of the most precise clocks and sensors developed to date, which exploit the quantum coherence of a single electronic or motional degree of freedom of an ion. However, future high precision quantum metrology will require the use of entangled states of several degrees of freedom. Here we propose a protocol capable of generating high N00N states where the entanglement is shared between the motion of a trapped ion and an electromagnetic cavity mode, a so called hybrid configuration. We prove the fea…
The rate of particle creation in a resonantly oscillating cavity is known to be approximately constant at large evolution times. Employing the Schwinger-Keldysh diagrammatic technique, we show that nonlinear interactions generate nonzero quantum averages and significantly enhance this rate. To illustrate this phenomenon, we consider a massless scalar field with a quartic interaction in a one-dimensional cavity with perfectly reflecting walls oscillating at twice the fundamental frequency.
We show that mode-mixing quantum gates can be produced by non-uniform relativistic acceleration. Periodic motion in cavities exhibits a series of resonant conditions producing entangling quantum gates between different frequency modes. The resonant condition associated with particle creation is the main feature of the dynamical Casimir effect which has been recently demonstrated in superconducting circuits. We show that a second resonance, which has attracted less attention since it implies negligible particle production, produces a beam splitting quantum gate leading to a resonant enhancement…
We demonstrate that quantum information processing can be implemented with ions trapped in a far detuned optical cavity. For sufficiently large detuning the system becomes insensitive to cavity decay. Following recent experimental progress, this scheme can be implemented with currently available technology.
We study the evolution of a photonic state in a coupled pair of anharmonic cavities and compare it with the corresponding system of two coupled harmonic cavities. The photons in the anharmonic cavities interact with a two-level atom and are described within the Jaynes-Cummings model. Starting from an eigenstate of the Jaynes-Cummings model with N photons, the evolution of this state in the presence of photon tunneling between the cavities is studied. We evaluate the spectral density, the dynamics of the return as well as the transition amplitudes and the probability for the dynamical creation …
We study two ions confined in a Penning trap. We show that electronically highly excited states exist in which an electron is delocalized among the two ions forming a giant molecule of several micrometer size. At energies close to the top of the Coulomb barrier these molecular states can be regarded as superpositions of Rydberg states of individual ions. We illuminate the possibility to observe coherent charge transfer between the ions. Beyond a critical principal quantum number the electron can coherently tunnel through the Coulomb barrier to an adjacent doubly charged ion. The tunneling occu…
We analyze the performance of a quantum repeater protocol based on single trapped ions. At each node, single trapped ions embedded into high finesse cavities emit single photons whose polarization is entangled with the ion state. A specific detection of two photons at a central station located half-way between two nodes heralds the entanglement of two remote ions. Entanglement can be extended to long distances by applying successive entanglement swapping operations based on two-ion gate operations that have already been demonstrated experimentally with high precision. Our calculation shows tha…
We propose a fast and efficient technique to create classes of highly entangled states of trapped ions, such as arbitrary Dicke states and superpositions of them, e.g. NOON states. The ions are initialized in the phonon ground state and are addressed globally with a composite pulse that is resonant with the first motional sideband. The technique operates on comparatively short time scales, as resonant interactions allow one to use the minimum laser pulse area. The number of single pulses from the composite sequence is equal to the number of ions, thus the implementation complexity grows only l…
We demonstrate precise control of the coupling of each of two trapped ions to the mode of an optical resonator. When both ions are coupled with near-maximum strength, we generate ion--ion entanglement heralded by the detection of two orthogonally polarized cavity photons. The entanglement fidelity with respect to the Bell state $Ψ^+$ reaches $F \geq (91.9\pm2.5)%$. This result represents an important step toward distributed quantum computing with cavities linking remote atom-based registers.
We study the peculiarities of the nonstationary Casimir effect (creation of photons in cavities with moving boundaries) in the special case of two resonantly coupled modes with frequencies $ω_0$ and $(3Δ)ω_0$, parametrically excited due to small amplitude oscillations of the ideal cavity wall at the frequency $2ω_0(1δ)$ (with $|δ|,|Δ|\ll 1$). The effects of thermally induced oscillations in time dependences of the mean numbers of created photons and the exchange of quantum purities between the modes are discovered. Squeezing and photon distributions in each modes are calculated for initial vac…
We consider the transversal modes of ions in a linear radio frequency (rf) trap where we control the time dependent axial confinement to show that we can excite quanta of motion via a two-mode squeezing process. This effect is analogous to phenomena predicted to occur during the evaporation of black holes and cosmological particle creation, in general out of reach for experimental investigation. As substantial advantage of this proposal in comparison to previous ones we propose to exploit radial and axial modes simultaneously to permit experimental access of these effects based on state-of-the…
Owing to their long excited state lifetimes, rare-earth ions in crystals are widely used in quantum applications. To allow optical readout of the qubit state of individual ions, we propose to dope the crystal with an additional nearby ancilla ion with a shorter radiative lifetime. We show how a Bayesian analysis exhausts the information about the state of the qubit from the optical signal of the ancilla ion. We study the effects of incoherent processes and propose ways to reduce their effect on the readout. Finally, we extend the architecture to ions residing in two remote cavities, and we sho…
The creation of matter and structure in our universe is currently described by an intricate interplay of quantum field theory and general relativity. Signatures of this process during an early inflationary period can be observed, while direct tests remain out of reach. Here, we study an experimental analog of the process based on trapped atomic ions. We create pairs of phonons by tearing apart quantum vacuum fluctuations. Thereby, we prepare ions in an entangled state of motion. Controlling timescales and the coupling to environments should permit optimizing efficiencies while keeping the effe…
We propose a scheme for the deterministic coherent manipulation of two atomic qutrits, trapped in separate cavities coupled through a short optical fibre or optical resonator. We study such a system in the regime of dispersive atom-field interactions, where the dynamics of atoms, cavities and fibre operates through virtual population of both the atomic excited states and photonic states in the cavities and fibre. We show that the resulting effective dynamics allows for the creation of robust qutrit entanglement, and thoroughly investigate the influence of imperfections and dissipation, due to …
Quantum networks are distributed quantum many-body systems with tailored topology and controlled information exchange. They are the backbone of distributed quantum computing architectures and quantum communication. Here we present a prototype of such a quantum network based on single atoms embedded in optical cavities. We show that atom-cavity systems form universal nodes capable of sending, receiving, storing and releasing photonic quantum information. Quantum connectivity between nodes is achieved in the conceptually most fundamental way: by the coherent exchange of a single photon. We demon…
We develop the theory to describe the equilibrium ion positions and phonon modes for a trapped ion quantum simulator in an oblate Paul trap that creates two-dimensional Coulomb crystals in a triangular lattice. By coupling the internal states of the ions to laser beams propagating along the symmetry axis, we study the effective Ising spin-spin interactions that are mediated via the axial phonons and are less sensitive to ion micromotion. We find that the axial mode frequencies permit the programming of Ising interactions with inverse power law spin-spin couplings that can be tuned from uniform…
We present a method to engineer the unitary charge conjugation operator, as given by quantum field theory, in the highly controlled context of quantum optics, thus allowing one to simulate the creation of charged particles with well-defined momenta simultaneously with their respective antiparticles. Our method relies on trapped ions driven by a laser field and interacting with a single mode of a light field in a high Q cavity.
Provided that cavities are initially in a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) entangled state, we show that GHZ states of N-group qubits distributed in N cavities can be created via a 3-step operation. The GHZ states of the N-group qubits are generated by using N-group qutrits placed in the N cavities. Here, "qutrit" refers to a three-level quantum system with the two lowest levels representing a qubit while the third level acting as an intermediate state necessary for the GHZ state creation. This proposal does not depend on the architecture of the cavity-based quantum network and the way for co…
We present a unitary quantum control scheme that produces a highly monochromatic ion beam from a Paul trap. Our protocol is implementable by supplying the segmented electrodes with voltages of the order of Volts, which mitigates the impact of fluctuating voltages in previous designs and leads to a low-dispersion beam of ions. Moreover, our proposal does not rely on sympathetically cooling the ions, which bypasses the need of loading different species in the trap -- namely, the propelled ion and, e.g., a $^{40}$Ca$^+$ atom able to exert sympathetic cooling -- incrementing the repetition rate of…
Heavy ions channeling through crystals with multi-GeV kinetic energies can create electron-positron pairs. In the framework of the ion, the energy of virtual photons arising from the periodic crystal potential may exceed the threshold $2mc^2$. The repeated periodic collisions with the crystal ions yield high pair production rates. When the virtual photon frequency matches a nuclear transition in the ion, the production rate can be resonantly increased. In this two-step excitation-pair conversion scheme, the excitation rates are coherently enhanced, and they scale approximately quadratically wi…
We report the creation of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states with up to 14 qubits. By investigating the coherence of up to 8 ions over time, we observe a decay proportional to the square of the number of qubits. The observed decay agrees with a theoretical model which assumes a system affected by correlated, Gaussian phase noise. This model holds for the majority of current experimental systems developed towards quantum computation and quantum metrology.
We first consider the basic requirements for a quantum computer, arguing for the attractiveness of nuclear spins as information-bearing entities, and light for the coupling which allows quantum gates. We then survey the strengths of and immediate prospects for quantum information processing in ion traps. We discuss decoherence and gate rates in ion traps, comparing methods based on the vibrational motion with a method based on exchange of photons in cavity QED. We then sketch the main features of a quantum computer designed to allow an algorithm needing 10^6 Toffoli gates on 100 logical qubits…
We propose a scheme to realize the fractional quantum Hall system with atoms confined in a two-dimensional array of coupled cavities. Our scheme is based on simple optical manipulation of atomic internal states and inter-cavity hopping of virtually excited photons. It is shown that as well as the fractional quantum Hall system, any system of hard-core bosons on a lattice in the presence of an arbitrary Abelian vector potential can be simulated solely by controlling the phases of constantly applied lasers. The scheme, for the first time, exploits the core advantage of coupled cavity simulations…
Linear Paul traps have been used recently to simulate the transverse field Ising model with long-range spin-spin couplings. We study the intrinsic effects of phonon creation (from the initial phonon ground state) on the spin-state probability and spin entanglement for such quantum spin simulators. While it has often been assumed that phonon effects are benign because they play no role in the pure Ising model, they can play a significant role when a transverse field is added to the model. We use a many-body factorization of the quantum time-evolution operator of the system, adiabatic perturbati…
High-fidelity qubit initialization is of significance for efficient error correction in fault tolerant quantum algorithms. Combining two best worlds, speed and robustness, to achieve high-fidelity state preparation and manipulation is challenging in quantum systems, where qubits are closely spaced in frequency. Motivated by the concept of shortcut to adiabaticity, we theoretically propose the shortcut pulses via inverse engineering and further optimize the pulses with respect to systematic errors in frequency detuning and Rabi frequency. Such protocol, relevant to frequency selectivity, is app…
We analyze the dynamics of a chain of singly-charged ions confined in a linear Paul trap and which couple with the mode of a high-finesse optical resonator. In these settings the ions interact via the Coulomb repulsion and are subject to the mechanical forces due to scattering of cavity photons. We show that the interplay of these interactions can give rise to bistable equilibrium configurations, into which the chain can be cooled by cavity-enhanced photon scattering. We characterize the resulting equilibrium structures by determining the stationary state in the semiclassical limit for both ca…
We report the realisation of a high-finesse open-access cavity array, tailored towards the creation of multiple coherent light-matter interfaces within a compact environment. We describe the key technical developments put in place to fabricate such a system, comprising the creation of tapered pyramidal substrates and an in-house laser machining setup. Cavities made from these mirrors are characterised, by laser spectroscopy, to possess similar optical properties to state-of-the-art fibre-tip cavities, but offer a compelling route towards improved performance, even when used to support only a s…
We study phonons in a dynamical chain of ions confined by a trap with a time-dependent (axial) potential strength and demonstrate that they behave in the same way as quantum fields in an expanding/contracting universe. Based on this analogy, we present a scheme for the detection of the analogue of cosmological particle creation which should be feasible with present-day technology. In order to test the quantum nature of the particle creation mechanism and to distinguish it from classical effects such as heating, we propose to measure the two-phonon amplitude via the $2^{\rm nd}$ red side-band a…
We propose a novel technique for the creation of maximally entangled symmetric Dicke states in an ion trap using adiabatic passage, which requires only a pair of chirped pulses from a single laser and is applicable to any number of ions and excitations. By utilising a particular factorisation of the Hilbert space for multi-level ladders we show that the problem can be reduced to `bow-tie' configuration energy-level crossings. This technique is naturally robust against fluctuations in the laser intensity and the chirp rate. Even when realistic heating rates are considered, we estimate that the …
We show how to apply Lyapunov control design to the problem of entanglement creation between two atoms in distant cavities connected by optical fibers. The Lyapunov control design is optimal in the sense that the distance from the target state decreases monotonically and exponentially, and the concurrence increases accordingly. This method is far more robust than simple geometric schemes.
We show how an ion trap, configured for the coherent manipulation of external and internal quantum states, can be used to simulate the irreversible dynamics of a collective angular momentum model known as the Dicke model. In the special case of two ions, we show that entanglement is created in the coherently driven steady state with linear driving. For the case of more than two ions we calculate the entanglement between two ions in the steady state of the Dicke model by tracing over all the other ions. The entanglement in the steady state is a maximum for the parameter values corresponding rou…
We present the controlled creation of single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers via ion implantation at the center of a photonic crystal cavity which is fabricated in an ultrapure, single crystal diamond membrane. High-resolution placement of NV centers is achieved using collimation of a 5keV-nitrogen ion beam through a pierced tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM). We demonstrate coupling of the implanted NV centers' broad band fluorescence to a cavity mode and observe Purcell enhancement of the spontaneous emission. The results are in good agreement with a master equation model for the cavity c…
The spectacular experimental results of the last few years in cavity quantum electrodynamics and trapped ions research has led to very high level laboratory performances. Such a stimulating situation essentially stems from two decisive advancements. The first is the invention of reliable protocols for the manipulation of single atoms. The second is the ability to produce desired bosonic environments on demand. These progresses have led to the possibility of controlling the form of the coupling between individual atoms and an arbitrary number of bosonic modes. As a consequence, fundamental matt…
We demonstrate the deterministic generation of multipartite entanglement based on scalable methods. Four qubits are encoded in $^{40}$Ca$^+$, stored in a micro-structured segmented Paul trap. These qubits are sequentially entangled by laser-driven pairwise gate operations. Between these, the qubit register is dynamically reconfigured via ion shuttling operations, where ion crystals are separated and merged, and ions are moved in and out of a fixed laser interaction zone. A sequence consisting of three pairwise entangling gates yields a four-ion GHZ state $\vertψ\rangle=\tfrac{1}{\sqrt{2}}\left…
We demonstrate a trapped-ion entangling-gate scheme proposed by Bermudez et al. [Phys. Rev. A 85, 040302 (2012)]. Simultaneous excitation of a strong carrier and a single-sideband transition enables deterministic creation of entangled states. The method works for magnetic field-insensitive states, is robust against thermal excitations, includes dynamical decoupling from qubit dephasing errors, and provides simplifications in experimental implementation compared to some other entangling gates with trapped ions. We achieve a Bell state fidelity of 0.974(4) and identify the main sources of error.
We introduce a scheme to reconstruct arbitrary states of networks composed of quantum oscillators--e.g., the motional state of trapped ions or the radiation state of coupled cavities. The scheme uses minimal resources, in the sense that it i) requires only the interaction between one-qubit probe and one constituent of the network; ii) provides the reconstructed state directly from the data, avoiding any tomographic transformation; iii) involves the tuning of only one coupling parameter. In addition, we show that a number of quantum properties can be extracted without full reconstruction of the…
We study the dynamical Casimir effect in a double superconducting cavity in a circuit quantum electrodynamics architecture. Parameters in the quantum circuit are chosen in such a way the superconducting cavity can mimic a double cavity, formed by two perfectly conducting outer walls and a dielectric one, with arbitrary permittivity separating both halves. We undertake a spectral analysis of the cavity, showing that the spectrum varies significantly depending on the values of the susceptibility of the dielectric mirror and the relative lengths of both cavities. We study the creation of photons …
Quantum discord, and a number of related indicators, are currently raising a relentless interest as a novel paradigm of non-classical correlations beyond entanglement. Beside merely fundamental aspects, various works have shown that discord is a valuable -- so far largely unexplored -- resource in quantum information processing. Along this line, quite a striking scheme is {entanglement activation}. An initial amount of discord between two disentangled parties of a multipartite system affects the dynamics so as to establish entanglement across a bipartition, which would not arise otherwise. To …
We propose a hardware architecture and protocol for connecting many local quantum processors contained within an optical cavity. The scheme is compatible with trapped ions or Rydberg arrays, and realizes teleported gates between any two qubits by distributing entanglement via single-photon transfers through a cavity. Heralding enables high-fidelity entanglement even for a cavity of moderate quality. For processors composed of trapped ions in a linear chain, a single cavity with realistic parameters successfully transfers photons every few $μ$s, enabling the any-to-any entanglement of 20 ion ch…
More than one hundred years ago Heinrich Hertz succeeded in transmitting signals over a few meters to a receiving antenna using an electromagnetic oscillator and thus proving the electromagnetic theory developed by James C. Maxwell[1]. Since then, technology has developed, and today a variety of oscillators is available at the quantum mechanical level. For quantized electromagnetic oscillations atoms in cavities can be used to couple electric fields[2, 3]. For mechanical oscillators realized, for example, with cantilevers[4, 5] or vibrational modes of trapped atoms[6] or ions[7, 8], a quantum …
Optical cavities are one of the best ways to increase atom-light coupling and will be a key ingredient for future quantum technologies that rely on light-matter interfaces. We demonstrate that traveling-wave "ring" cavities can achieve a greatly reduced mode waist $w$, leading to larger atom-cavity coupling strength, relative to conventional standing-wave cavities for given mirror separation and stability. Additionally, ring cavities can achieve arbitrary transverse-mode spacing simultaneously with the large mode-waist reductions. Following these principles, we build a parabolic atom-ring cavi…
Promising access to high-speed quantum networks relies on the creation of high-dimensional entangled memories that provide quantum communication with higher capacity of noisy quantum channels, thereby reducing the transmission time of information. Yet, the distribution of multidimensional entanglement between remote memory nodes is still faintly investigated. We propose an experimentally feasible protocol of deterministic generation of high-dimensional entanglement between distant multi-level atoms confined in high-finesse optical cavities and driven by laser pulses. Three-dimensional entangle…
The endeavour to develop quantum networks gave rise to a rapidly developing field with far reaching applications such as secure communication and the realisation of distributed computing tasks. This ultimately calls for the creation of flexible multi-user structures that allow for quantum communication between arbitrary pairs of parties in the network and facilitate also multi-user applications. To address this challenge, we propose a 2D quantum repeater architecture to establish long-distance entanglement shared between multiple communication partners in the presence of channel noise and impe…
We study photon creation in a cavity with two perfectly conducting moving mirrors. We derive the dynamic equations of the modes and study different situations concerning various movements of the walls, such as translational or breathing modes. We can even apply our approach to one or three dimensional cavities and reobtain well known results of cavities with one moving mirror. We compare the numerical results with analytical predictions and discuss the effects of the intermode coupling in detail as well as the non perturbative regime. We also study the time evolution of the energy density as w…
We study the case of two polaritonic qubits localized in two separate cavities coupled by a fiber/additional cavity. We show that surprisingly enough, even a coherent classical pump in the intermediate cavity/fiber can lead to the creation of entanglement between the two ends in the steady state. The stationary nature of this entanglement and its survival under dissipation opens possibilities for its production under realistic laboratory conditions. To facilitate the verification of the entanglement in an experiment we also construct the relevant entanglement witness measurable by accessing on…
Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) coupled to quantum dots (QDs), trapped atoms and ions, and point defects have been proposed as quantum transduction platforms, yet the requisite coupling rates and cavity lifetimes have not been experimentally established. Although the interaction mechanism varies, small acoustic cavities with large zero-point motion are required for high efficiencies. We experimentally establish the feasibility of this platform through electro- and opto-mechanical characterization of tightly focusing, single-mode Gaussian SAW cavities at $\sim$3.6 GHz on GaAs. We explore the perf…
Experimental setups that study laser-cooled ions immersed in baths of ultracold atoms merge the two exciting and well-established fields of quantum gases and trapped ions. These experiments benefit both from the exquisite read-out and control of the few-body ion systems as well as the many-body aspects, tunable interactions, and ultracold temperatures of the atoms. However, combining the two leads to challenges both in the experimental design and the physics that can be studied. Nevertheless, these systems have provided insights into ion-atom collisions, buffer gas cooling of ions and quantum …
