Quantum Networks Team

The team has recently managed to store light that propagates in an optical fiber and to release it later on demand. By causing interaction between the traveling light and a few thousand atoms in the vicinity, we demonstrated an all-fibered memory. At the core of the device is a fiber with a short section elongated to 400 nm in diameter where the light can efficiently interact with a cloud of laser-cooled atoms. Using the so-called electromagnetically induced transparency technique, well-known in free space but combined for the first time with a fiber, we slowed down the light by 3000-fold and then halted it completely. Later, the light was released into the fiber, reconstituting the initial encoded information that can once again travel. All that was performed at the single photon level with a signal to noise ratio above 20 !

This work was published in Physical Review Letters and selected as PRL Editors suggestions. Covered also by APS-Physics and PhysicsWorld. Selected by OSA Optics and Photonics News in Optics in 2015.