Entanglement between a photonic time-bin qubit and a collective atomic spin excitation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates entanglement between a photonic time-bin qubit and a collective atomic spin excitation, enabling long-distance quantum communication with robust encoding and state mapping.

Contribution

It introduces a method to generate and verify entanglement between photonic time-bin qubits and atomic spin excitations using magnetic field-induced dephasing and rephasing.

Findings

Successful generation of entanglement verified by Bell inequality violation

Mapping atomic qubits onto photonic qubits demonstrated

Use of time-bin encoding enhances robustness against decoherence

Abstract

Entanglement between light and matter combines the advantage of long distance transmission of photonic qubits with the storage and processing capabilities of atomic qubits. To distribute photonic states efficiently over long distances several schemes to encode qubits have been investigated -- time-bin encoding being particularly promising due to its robustness against decoherence in optical fibers. Here, we demonstrate the generation of entanglement between a photonic time-bin qubit and a single collective atomic spin excitation (spin-wave) in a cold atomic ensemble, followed by the mapping of the atomic qubit onto another photonic qubit. A magnetic field that induces a periodic dephasing and rephasing of the atomic excitation ensures the temporal distinguishability of the two time-bins and plays a central role in the entanglement generation. To analyse the generated quantum state, we use largely imbalanced Mach-Zehnder interferometers to perform projective measurements in different qubit bases and verify the entanglement by violating a CHSH Bell inequality.