An Entangling Quantum-Logic Gate Operated with an Ultrabright Single Photon-Source
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An entangling quantum-logic gate operated with an ultrabright single photon-source O. Gazzano1, M. P. Almeida2;3, A. K. Nowak 1, S. L. Portalupi1, A. Lema^ıtre1, I. Sagnes1, A. G. White2;3 and P. Senellart1 1Laboratoire de Photonique et de Nanostructures, CNRS, UPR20, Route de Nozay, 91460 Marcoussis, France 2Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems & 3Centre for Quantum Computer and Communication Technology, School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Queensland, Brisbane QLD 4072, Australia We demonstrate unambiguous entangling operation of a photonic quantum-logic gate driven by an ultrabright solid-state single-photon source. Indistinguishable single photons emitted by a single semiconductor quantum dot in a micropillar optical cavity are used as target and control qubits. For a source brightness of 0.56 collected photons-per-pulse, the measured truth table has an overlap with the ideal case of 68:4±0:5%, increasing to 73:0±0:6% for a source brightness of 0.17 photons- per-pulse. The gate is entangling: at a source brightness of 0.48, the Bell-state fidelity is above the entangling threshold of 50%, and reaches 71:0±3:6% for a source brightness of 0.15. The heart of quantum information processing is en- measured [24]; and in bulk polarisation-optics [25], where tangling separate qubits using multi-qubit gates: the the gate process fidelity was bounded by measurements in canonical entangling gate is the controlled-not (cnot) two orthogonal bases [26]. These are necessary, but not gate, which flips the state of a target qubit depending sufficient measurements for unambiguously establishing on the state of the control. A universal quantum com- entanglement [27], e.g. a cnot gate has the same truth puter can be built using solely cnot gates and arbitrary table as a classical, reversible-xor gate. local rotations [1], the latter being trivial in photonics. Here we show unambiguous operation of an entan- In 2001, Knill, Laflamme and Milburn (KLM) demon- gling cnot gate using single photons emitted by a sin- strated that photonic multi-qubit gates, could be imple- gle quantum-dot deterministically coupled to the opti- mented using only linear-optical components and pro- cal mode of a pillar microcavity. The source is oper- jective measurements and feedforward [2]. Since then, ated at a remarkably high brightness|above 0.65 col- many schemes to implement linear-optical cnot gates lected photons-per-pulse|and successively emitted pho- have been theoretically proposed [3{5] and experimen- tons present a mean wave-packet overlap [17] between tally demonstrated [6{12]. These demonstrations all used 50% and 72%. Bell-state fidelities above 50% are an parametric down conversion as photon sources, however unimpeachable entanglement witness [27]: we see fideli- such sources are not suitable for scalable implementations ties up to 71:0 3:6%. −6 ± due to their inherently low source brightness|10 to Our source was grown by molecular beam epitaxy, and −4 10 photons-per-excitation pulse|and contamination consists of an InGaAs annealed QD layer between two with a small but significant multiple-photon component Bragg reflectors with 16 (36) pairs for the top (bottom) [13{15]. mirror. After spin-coating the sample with a photore- Semiconductor quantum-dots (QDs) confined in mi- sist, low temperature in-situ lithography is used to define cropillar optical cavities are close to ideal as photon pillars deterministically coupled to single QDs [29]. We arXiv:1303.0271v2 [quant-ph] 4 Mar 2013 sources, emitting pulses containing one and only one first select QDs with optimal quantum efficiency and ap- photon, with high efficiency and brightness. QDs have propriate emission wavelength to be spectrally matched been shown to emit single photons [16], indistinguish- to 2.5 µm diameter pillar cavities. A green laser beam able photons [17], and entangled photon pairs [18, 19]. is used to expose the disk defining the pillar centered Intrinsically, the dots emit photons isotropically: both on the selected QD with 50 nm accuracy. To operate tapered single mode waveguides [20] and micropillar cav- the source close to maximum brightness and maintain a ities [21, 22] have enabled the fabrication of single photon reasonably high degree of indistinguishability, we use a sources with brightness of 80%. In the latter case, the two color excitation scheme. A 905 nm 82 MHz pulsed ∼ Purcell effect further allows reducing the dephasing in- laser resonant to an excited state of the QD is used to duced by the solid state environment, yielding photons saturate the QD transition while a low power continu- with a large degree of indistinguishability [17, 22, 23]. ous wave laser at 850 nm is used to fill traps in the QD Very recently, quantum-dot photon sources have been surrounding, thereby reducing fluctuations of the electro- used to drive linear-optical entangling gates: on a semi- static environment. For more details see reference [22]. conductor waveguide chip, where the truth table was Our source has a maximum brightness of 0.79 photons- 2 2.3ns ate the source at brightness of 75% for measuring the gate a) Fiber SPADs collimator Spectrometer truth table and at a brightness of 65% for demonstrating +2.3ns Laser pulse two-photon entanglement. NPBS To generate the target and control input photons, Microscope the source is excited twice every 12.2ns|the repeti- objective b) CNOT gate tion rate of the laser|with a delay between the two Micropillar Calcite excitations of 2.3 ns. The two photons are non- C QD Cin out deterministically spatially-separated by coupling the T source to a 50/50 fiber beam splitter, and non- T out Cryostat 4K in deterministically temporally-overlapped by adding the 22.5° 17.5° 22.5° 2.3 ns delay to one of the fibre paths. We implement c) d) the cnot gate following the design of reference [6], which 100 requires both classical and quantum multi-path interfer- 60 ence, Fig.1b. The logical qubits are encoded on the po- 80 larization state of the photons with 0 H and 1 V . pulse (%) r We initialise with polarisers, and setj thei≡| gatei input-statej i≡| i 60 40 using half-wave plates. Half-wave plates on the control 40 input and output act as Hadamard gates, the internal PL half-wave plate implements the three 1/3 beamsplitters photons pe Coincidences 20 d 20 920 1000 at the heart of this gate [6]. The waveplates and po- Wavelength larisers on the output modes enable analysis in any po- 0 0 larisation basis. For spectral filtering, the gate outputs -24.4 0.0 24.4 Collecte 024 6 are coupled to spectrometers, and are detected via single Delay (ns) Pump power (mW) photon avalanche photodiodes with 350 ps time resolu- tion. FIG. 1. a) Schematic of the the experimental setup. Single photons are produced by a QD in a micro-pillar optical cavity, To obtain the truth table, we measured the output of excited by two consecutive laser pulses, temporally-separated the gate for each of the four possible logical basis input by 2.3 ns. A non-polarising beam splitter reflecting 90% of states HH ; HV ; VH ; VV where ct are the con- the QD signal is employed to send the QD emission into a trol andfj targeti j qubiti j states.i j Figureig 2a presentsj i a typical single-mode fiber and to the input of the CNOT gate. Polar- experimental correlation histogram. Every 12.2 ns, a set izers, half- and quarter- wave plates are used for state prepa- of five peaks is observed: each peak corresponds to one ration and analysis. The photons are spectrally filtered by two spectrometers and detected by single-photon avalanche pho- of the five possible paths followed by the two photons ton diodes (SPAD). b) Experimental schematic of the CNOT generated with a 2.3 ns delay. The central peak, at zero gate, as described in [6]. c) Autocorrelation function mea- delay, corresponds to events where both the control and sured on the QD exciton line. d) Collected photons-per-pulse target photons enter the gate simultaneously. We will as a function of the pump power. Insert: Emission spectrum hereafter refer to the five central peaks centred at zero of the single photon source. delay as correlated peaks and the set of peaks centred at per excitation pulse, Fig. 1d, as measured in the first p 12:2 ns (p Z∗) as uncorrelated peaks. For each set of collection lens, Fig. 1a. peaks,× we also2 define 5 time bins of variable width, sepa- The QD emission is collected by a 0.4 NA microscope rated by 2.3 ns, in order to temporally analyze the time objective and coupled to a single-mode fiber with a 70% evolution of the signal. To evaluate the gate properties, efficiency, estimated by comparing the measured single we measure the area of the peaks for a given temporal- photon count rate with and without fiber coupling. The bin size. Because the emission decay time of the source typical spectrum of the source is shown in the insert of is 750 ps, adjacent peaks slightly temporally-overlap on Fig. 1d, note the single emission line at 930 nm. To char- the order of 5 to 10%. The experimental data presented acterize the purity of the single photon emission, we mea- hereafter are corrected for this overlap (see Supplemen- sure the second-order correlation function, g2, using an tary information). Hanbury Brown-Twiss setup [30]. Figure 1c. shows the Figures 2b and 2c present the measured area of the measured auto-correlation function under pulsed excita- correlated and uncorrelated peaks for the control-qubit tion only.