Publications

We present a multipartite nonlocal game in which each player must guess the input received by his neighbour. We show that quantum correlations do not perform better than classical ones at this game, for any prior distribution of the inputs. There exist, however, input distributions for which general no-signalling correlations can outperform classical and quantum correlations. Some of the Bell inequalities associated to our construction correspond to facets of the local polytope. Thus our multipartite game identifies parts of the boundary between quantum and post-quantum correlations of maximal dimension. These results suggest that quantum correlations might obey a generalization of the usual no-signalling conditions in a multipartite setting.

We present a detailed study of the lifetime of optical spectral holes due to population storage in Zeeman sublevels of Nd$^{3+}$:Y$_2$SiO$_5$. The lifetime is measured as a function of magnetic field strength and orientation, temperature and Nd$^{3+}$ doping concentration. At the lowest temperature of 3 K we find a general trend where the lifetime is short at low field strengths, then increases to a maximum lifetime at a few hundreds of mT, and then finally decays rapidly for high field strengths. This behaviour can be modelled with a relaxation rate dominated by Nd$^{3+}$-Nd$^{3+}$ cross relaxation at low fields and spin lattice relaxation at high magnetic fields. The maximum lifetime depends strongly on both the field strength and orientation, due to the competition between these processes and their different angular dependencies. The cross relaxation limits the maximum lifetime for concentrations as low as 30 ppm of Nd$^{3+}$ ions. By decreasing the concentration to less than 1 ppm we could completely eliminate the cross relaxation, reaching a lifetime of 3.8 s at 3~K. At higher temperatures the spectral hole lifetime is limited by the magnetic-field independent Raman and Orbach processes. In addition we show that the cross relaxation rate can be strongly reduced by creating spectrally large holes of the order of the optical inhomogeneous broadening. Our results are important for the development and design of new rare-earth-ion doped crystals for quantum information processing and narrow-band spectral filtering for biological tissue imaging.

Contrary to approaches which try to mimic a standard fiber as closely as possible, the emulator presented here gives constant (but user adjustable) values for differential group delay (DGD) and ratio of first- to second-order polarization-mode dispersion (PMD). Once it is set, the ratio is conserved while the DGD can be easily varied within a range of 0-300 ps. This allows to investigate the low-probability events of large DGD and second-order PMD important for system outage.

We demonstrate that Zeeman ground-state spin levels in Nd 3 + : YVO 4 provides the possibility to create an efficient Λ - system for optical pumping experiments. The branching ratio R in the Λ -system is measured experimentally via absorption spectroscopy and is compared to a theoretical model. We show that R can be tuned by changing the orientation of the magnetic field. These results are applied to optical pumping experiments, where significant improvement is obtained compared to previous experiments in this system. The tunability of the branching ratio in combination with its good coherence properties and the high oscillator strength makes Nd 3 + : YVO 4 an interesting candidate for various quantum information protocols.

An efficient multimode quantum memory is a crucial resource for long-distance quantum communication based on quantum repeaters. We propose a quantum memory based on spectral shaping of an inhomogeneously broadened optical transition into an atomic frequency comb (AFC). The spectral width of the AFC allows efficient storage of multiple temporal modes without the need to increase the absorption depth of the storage material, in contrast to previously known quantum memories. Efficient readout is possible thanks to rephasing of the atomic dipoles due to the AFC structure. Long-time storage and on-demand readout is achieved by use of spin states in a lambda-type configuration. We show that an AFC quantum memory realized in solids doped with rare-earth-metal ions could store hundreds of modes or more with close to unit efficiency, for material parameters achievable today.

No abstract is provided for this article.

Reflectivity measurements of wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) filters were performed with polarization independent coherent optical frequency domain reflectometry (C-OFDR). The spectral resolution of 0.012 mn allowed to characterize side lobe spacing and reflectivity with 90-dB dynamic range. The off-channel reflectivity was also measured for estimating the interchannel crosstalk in WDM systems and the experimental results were fitted to a theoretical equation, extracting the physical parameters of the filter.

We use heralded single photons to perform an antibunching experiment in which the clicks at the detectors are spacelike separated events. The idea of such experiment dates back to the 5th Solvay conference, when it was proposed by Einstein as an expression of his concerns about quantum theory.