Abstract

Rare-earth (RE) doped crystals are promising candidates as quantum memories as they offer coherence properties comparable to those of atomic systems, but free of the drawbacks deriving from the atomic motion. The research on RE doped crystals quantum memories has been so far mostly focused on the mapping of quantum bits to optical collective excitations using the atomic frequency comb (AFC) or the gradient echo memory protocols [1-3]. However, this leads to short lived and mostly pre-determined storage. In this contribution, we report the first solid state spin-wave optical quantum memory with on-demand read-out. We also demonstrate the first spin-wave storage of time-bin qubits with conditional fidelities higher than for classical memories [4].

© 2015 IEEE