Atom-light hybrid interferometer for atomic sensing with quantum memory

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel atom-light hybrid interferometer that leverages quantum memory and heterodyne detection to enhance atomic sensing capabilities without requiring temporal overlap, promising advancements in quantum networks.

Contribution

A new protocol for atom-light interferometry using heterodyne mixing, enabling phase information retrieval without temporal overlap, improving sensitivity scaling with quantum memory lifetime.

Findings

Successfully recovered phase information from interference patterns.

Sensitivity scales favorably with quantum memory lifetime.

Potential applications in distributed quantum networks.

Abstract

Quantum memories feature a reversible conversion of optical fields into long-lived atomic spin waves, and are therefore ideal for operating as sensitive atomic sensors. However, up to now, atom-light interferometers have lacked an efficient approach to exploit their ultimate atomic sensing performance, since an extra optical delay line is required to compensate for the memory time. Here, we report a new protocol that records the photocurrent via heterodyne mixing with a stable local oscillator. The obtained complex quadrature amplitude that carries information imprinted on its phase by an external magnetic field, is successfully recovered from the interference patterns between the light and the atomic spin wave, without the stringent requirement of having them overlap in time. Our results reveal that the sensitivity scales favorably with the lifetime of the quantum memory. Our work may have important applications in building distributed quantum networks through quantum memory-assisted atom-light interferometers.