Disruptive Approaches to Atom-Light Interfaces

Realizing an efficient, controllable interface between photons and atoms or atom-like emitters forms the basis for wide-ranging applications, such as quantum memories for light and nonlinear optics at the single-photon level. However, despite many spectacular demonstrations of quantum atom-light interactions, such interfaces still face two major bottlenecks. First, the error bounds for most protocols scale unfavorably with system resources. Second, it is extremely difficult to improve these figures of merit in conventional systems. Within this context, DAALI will pursue new, disruptive platforms and protocols, which offer novel solutions to boost important system parameters and/or reduce the resources needed for applications. In particular, we will: • Develop state-of-the-art interfaces between atomic media and nano/micro-photonic systems. Such systems offer excellent potential for scalability and large atom-photon coupling strengths. Moreover, the flexibility to engineer their spatial modes and dispersion enables new, powerful paradigms that have no obvious analogue in macroscopic interfaces. • Demonstrate novel protocols for quantum memories and photon-photon gates. These protocols will take advantage of novel mechanisms such as those found in nanophotonic interfaces, “selective radiance,” and strong atom-atom interactions. These novel effects can even enable error rates that scale exponentially better as a function of physical resources than previously known bounds. DAALI brings together partners with theoretical and experimental expertise in atomic physics, quantum optics, and photonics, who will work together to solve the multi-disciplinary challenges needed to design and construct real systems that can maximally utilize and exploit these disparate concepts. Our results have the potential to completely re-define the technological possibilities of light-matter interfaces.