Realization of multidimensional einstein-podolsky-rosen paradox between single photon and atomic spin-wave excitation

摘要

Summary form only given. With the rapid development of spatially-resolving single-photon detectors, spatially structured multidimensional entangled states start to play a key role in modern quantum science. In particular, they find extensive applications in emerging fields such as quantum imaging, holography, computation or quantum-enhanced metrology. Moreover, spatially-multiplexed schemes hold a promise to increase the capacity of quantum channels, essential for quantum key distribution. An appealing perspective is to apply these ideas to light-atom interfaces, that are capable of storing and processing continuous-variable (CV) entanglement, critical for novel quantum cryptography, computation and imaging schemes.Here we generate a hybrid bipartite entangled state of a photon and an atomic spin-wave excitation [1], exhibiting Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) correlations in real space of continuous position-momentum variables, as in the original EPR proposal [2]. We verify the entanglement by measuring the coincidence patterns corresponding to modulus-squared spatial wavefunctions of the state. By studying temporal evolution and decoherence we find that the EPR entanglement may be stored for several microseconds. Our approach turns out to be by far more robust than the only hitherto performed experiment, based on quadratures of squeezed light and a slow-light medium, where time-delayed EPR correlations were demonstrated [3]. We achieve two orders of magnitude longer delay time using quantum memory setup and significantly stronger violation of EPR inequality [4], with product of variances 3 times below the EPR bound for the full two-dimensional coincidence distribution.