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Title: Hong-Ou-Mandel interference of single-photon-level pulses stored in independent room-temperature quantum memories
Abstract

Quantum repeater networks require independent absorptive quantum memories capable of storing and retrieving indistinguishable photons to perform high-repetition entanglement swapping operations. The ability to perform these coherent operations at room temperature is of prime importance for the realization of scalable quantum networks. We perform Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between photonic polarization states and single-photon-level pulses stored and retrieved from two sets of independent room-temperature quantum memories. We show that the storage and retrieval of polarization states from quantum memories does not degrade the HOM visibility for few-photon-level polarization states in a dual-rail configuration. For single-photon-level pulses, we measure the HOM visibility with various levels of background in a single polarization, single-rail QM, and investigate its dependence on the signal-to-background ratio. We obtain an HOM visibility of 43%, compared to the 48% no-memory limit of our set-up. These results allow us to estimate a 33% visibility for polarization qubits under the same conditions. These demonstrations lay the groundwork for future applications using large-scale memory-assisted quantum networks.

 
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NSF-PAR ID:
10485967
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Nature Publishing Group
Date Published:
Journal Name:
npj Quantum Information
Volume:
10
Issue:
1
ISSN:
2056-6387
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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