Controllable single-photon transport between remote coupled-cavity arrays

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for controllable single-photon transfer between remote coupled-cavity arrays using an atom as a quantum switch, enabling quantum routing with minimal information leakage.

Contribution

A novel approach employing an atom-controlled quantum switch for long-range photon transport in coupled-cavity arrays, extendable to quantum routing in networks.

Findings

Quantum information leakage can be minimized with perturbative control.

The method enables on-demand photon transport and storage.

Numerical simulations confirm the feasibility of the approach.

Abstract

We develop a new approach for controllable single-photon transport between two remote one-dimensional coupled-cavity arrays, used as quantum registers, mediated by an additional one-dimensional coupled-cavity array, acting as a quantum channel. A single two-level atom located inside one cavity of the intermediate channel is used to control the long-range coherent quantum coupling between two remote registers, thereby functioning as a quantum switch. With a time-independent perturbative treatment, we find that the leakage of quantum information can in principle be made arbitrarily small. Furthermore, our method can be extended to realize a quantum router in multi-register quantum networks, where single-photons can be either stored in one of the registers or transported to another on demand. These results are confirmed by numerical simulations.