Light, meet matter: Single-photon quantum memory in diamond optical phonons at room temperature
Monday, March 2, 2015 - 09:30
in Physics & Chemistry
(Phys.org)—Photonic quantum technologies – including cryptography, enhanced measurement and information processing – face a conundrum: They require single photons, but these are difficult to create, manipulate and measure. At the same time, quantum memories enable these technologies by acting as a photonic buffer. Therefore, an ideal part of the solution would be a single-photon on-demand read/write quantum memory. To date, however, development of a practical single-photon quantum memory has been stymied by (1) the need for high efficiency, (2) the read/write lasers used introducing noise that contaminates the quantum state, and (3) decoherence of the information stored in the memory.