A Correlated Quantum Walk: Random walks are powerful tools for modeling statistical events. The analogous quantum walk involves particles tunneling between available sites.
Peruzzo
et al. (p. 1500 ; see the Perspective by Hillery ) now report on the quantum walk of a correlated pair of photons propagating through a coupled waveguide array. The output pattern resulting from the injection of two correlated photons possess quantum features, indicating that the photons retain their correlations as they walk randomly through the waveguide array, allowing scale-up and parallel searches over many possible paths.
Integrated photonics will play a key role in quantum systems as they grow from few-qubit prototypes to tens of thousands of qubits. The underlying optical quantum technologies can only be realized through the integration of these components onto quantum photonic integrated circuits (QPICs) with accompanying electronics. In the last decade, remarkable advances in quantum photonic integration have enabled table-top experiments to be scaled down to prototype chips with improvements in efficiency, robustness, and key performance metrics. These advances have enabled integrated quantum photonic technologies combining up to 650 optical and electrical components onto a single chip that are capable of programmable quantum information processing, chip-to-chip networking, hybrid quantum system integration, and high-speed communications. In this roadmap article, we highlight the status, current and future challenges, and emerging technologies in several key research areas in integrated quantum photonics, including photonic platforms, quantum and classical light sources, quantum frequency conversion, integrated detectors, and applications in computing, communications, and sensing. With advances in materials, photonic design architectures, fabrication and integration processes, packaging, and testing and benchmarking, in the next decade we can expect a transition from single- and few-function prototypes to large-scale integration of multi-functional and reconfigurable devices that will have a transformative impact on quantum information science and engineering.
We produce a 600-ns pulse of 1.86-dB squeezed vacuum at 795 nm in an optical parametric amplifier and store it in a rubidium vapor cell for using electromagnetically induced transparency. The recovered pulse, analyzed using time-domain homodyne tomography, exhibits up to of squeezing. We identify the factors leading to the degradation of squeezing and investigate the phase evolution of the atomic coherence during the storage interval.
We report on a direct experimental observation of dynamic localization (DL) of light in sinusoidally-curved lithium-niobate waveguide arrays which provides the optical analog of DL for electrons in periodic potentials subjected to ac electric fields as originally proposed by Dunlap and Kenkre [ Phys. Rev. B 34, 3625 (1986)]. The theoretical condition for DL in a sinusoidal field is experimentally demonstrated.
The technologies of quantum information and quantum control are rapidly improving, but full exploitation of their capabilities requires complete characterization and assessment of processes that occur within quantum devices. We present a method for characterizing, with arbitrarily high accuracy, any quantum optical process. Our protocol recovers complete knowledge of the process by studying, via homodyne tomography, its effect on a set of coherent states, that is, classical fields produced by common laser sources. We demonstrate the capability of our protocol by evaluating and experimentally verifying the effect of a test process on squeezed vacuum.