Periodic Reporting for period 4 - SEAQUEL (Structured Ensembles of Atoms for Quantum Engineering of Light)
Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2021-12-31
Engineering complex quantum system out of elementary quantum objects such as atoms or photons can boost the speed of some computations, help transmitting confidential information safely, or enhance the precision of measurement devices. Among existing elementary quantum bricks, photons are the only ones that can be transmitted over large distances, but they cannot efficiently interact with each other to form a complex system, which hampers their use in many applications. Our project circumvented this issue by combining tecniques from several branches of quantum engineering. We designed and built a new platform where photons can strongly interact with each other in a controlled way, enabling many applications in quantum communications, logic and simulations.
We designed a new experimental platform for quantum engineering of light, aiming at creating and controlling strong interactions between optical photons. This platform combines the advantages of two existing approaches, one based on the strong coupling of light to individual quantum objects, the other one - on the conversion of photons into excitations of strongly interacting atoms. In a recent publication and in a series of conferences, we demonstrated that this combination successfully circumvents several major technical and physical limitations of these two approaches taken separately. We used this platform to deterministically generate non-classical states of light with a high purity. We also developed a ultra-compact system for controlling and imaging cold atoms in such hybrid quantum platforms, in order to make them more integrable.
Our platform successfully combines two approaches for deterministic quantum engineering of light, allowing us to circumvent their individual drawbacks. It already allowed us to deterministically generate non-classical light with high purity. In the near future, we will use it to create quantum logic gates enabling long-distance quantum communications, and to emulate highly-correlated quantum systems central to condensed-matter physics.