Speaker
Description
Quantum communication promises to revolutionize telecommunications, upgrading it to a new standard of security, grounded on the laws of Physics. A plethora of implementations for quantum communication have been proposed, but a general principle is that photons are useful for long distance communication, while matter is convenient for storage of quantum information and to generate photonic states.
A particularly fascinating approach to optical quantum memories is the dark-state polariton scheme, which uses electromagnetic-induced transparency to adiabatically transfer the quantum state of the optical field to and from an atomic ensemble, by varying the strength of a control field. We investigate dark-state polaritons in ensembles of rubidium atoms, working towards the improvement of optical quantum memory protocols for cold atoms in magneto-optical traps and warm vapour cells. On a more fundamental level, we study how quantum correlations, in particular entanglement, arise in atomic ensembles when photons are absorbed.
