Quantum Storage of a Photonic Polarization Qubit in a Solid

Abstract

We report on the quantum storage and retrieval of photonic polarization quantum bits onto and out of a solid state storage device. The qubits are implemented with weak coherent states at the single photon level, and are stored for a predetermined time of 500 ns in a praseodymium doped crystal with a storage and retrieval efficiency of 10%, using the atomic frequency comb scheme. We characterize the storage by using quantum state tomography, and find that the average conditional fidelity of the retrieved qubits exceeds 95% for a mean photon number μ=0.4. This is significantly higher than a classical benchmark, taking into account the poissonian statistics and finite memory efficiency, which proves that our crystal functions as a quantum storage device for polarization qubits. These results extend the storage capabilities of solid state quantum light matter interfaces to polarization encoding, which is widely used in quantum information science.