Storage and retrieval of microwave fields at the single-photon level in a spin ensemble

C. Grezes (1) , B. Julsgaard (2) , Y. Kubo (1) , W. L. Ma (3, 4) , M. Stern (1) , A. Bienfait (1) , K. Nakamura (5) , J. Isoya (6) , S. Onoda (7) , T. Ohshima (7) , V. Jacques (8) , Denis Vion (1) , Daniel Esteve (1) , R. B. Liu (4) , K. Mølmer (2) , Patrice Bertet (1)

1 QUANTRONICS - Quantronics Group
2 Department of Physics and Astronomy [Aarhus]
3 Department of Physics [Hong Kong University of Science and Technology]
4 Department of Physics
5 State Key Laboratory for Superlattices and Microstructures, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences
6 Université de Tsukuba = University of Tsukuba
7 Japan Atomic Energy Agency
8 LAC - Laboratoire Aimé Cotton

We report the storage of microwave pulses at the single-photon level in a spin-ensemble memory consisting of 10 10 nitrogen-vacancy centers in a diamond crystal coupled to a superconducting LC resonator. The energy of the signal, retrieved 100 μs later by spin-echo techniques, reaches 0.3% of the energy absorbed by the spins. This 0.3% storage efficiency is quantitatively accounted for by simulations. This figure of merit is sufficient to envision first implementations of a quantum memory for superconducting qubits.

Domains: Physics [physics]

C. Grezes, B. Julsgaard, Y. Kubo, W. L. Ma, M. Stern, et al.. Storage and retrieval of microwave fields at the single-photon level in a spin ensemble. Physical Review A : Atomic, molecular, and optical physics [1990-2015], 2015, 92, pp.020301. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevA.92.020301⟩. ⟨cea-01366672⟩