Laser-written integrated platform for quantum storage of heralded single photons

TL;DR

This paper introduces a laser-written integrated photonic platform for quantum storage of heralded single photons, achieving enhanced efficiency, longer storage times, and reduced power requirements, advancing scalable quantum information technologies.

Contribution

The authors present a novel laser writing regime for waveguides enabling improved light confinement and demonstrate the first single photon storage in such waveguides with significantly enhanced performance.

Findings

Achieved single photon storage in laser written waveguides.

Enhanced light-matter interaction by nearly an order of magnitude.

Extended excited state storage times by 100 times.

Abstract

Efficient and long-lived interfaces between light and matter are crucial for the development of quantum information technologies. Integrated photonics solutions for quantum storage devices offer improved performances due to light confinement and enable more complex and scalable designs. We demonstrate a novel platform for quantum light storage based on laser written waveguides. The new writing regime adopted allows us to attain waveguides with improved confining capabilities compared to previous demonstrations. We report the first demonstration of single photon storage in laser written waveguides. While we achieve storage efficiencies comparable to those observed in massive samples, the power involved for the memory preparation is strongly reduced, by a factor 100, due to an enhancement of the light-matter interaction of almost one order of magnitude. Moreover, we demonstrate excited state storage times 100 times longer than previous realizations with single photons in integrated quantum memories. Our system promises to effectively fulfill the requirements for efficient and scalable integrated quantum storage devices.