Abstract

Atoms and photons are well suited candidates for quantum information processing and quantum communication. While atoms can be used for storage and manipulation, photons represent ideal carriers for the transfer of quantum information. In this context one would strongly benefit from an interface between these two quantum systems. It would form a basic ingredient for a quantum repeater and allow distant manipulations of the atomic state via quantum teleportation and remote state preparation protocols. Here we present the first experimental demonstration of the remote preparation of an internal state of a single ⁸⁷ Rb atom. Our approach uses atom-photon entanglement[l] as the interface between the two quantum systems and allows to distantly prepare an arbitrary quantum state of a distant atomic qubit. For this purpose we use the quantum teleportation protocol, where the desired state is first prepared on the photon and, after Bell state measurement, transfered to the atom.

© 2007 IEEE