Numerical Simulations of Atomic Frequency Comb Quantum Memories for Long Term Storage

Abstract: Quantum memories are used for storing the quantum mechanical states of photons and release identical photons at a later time. This has many applications within the field of quantum computing and is also essential in order to achieve long range quantum communication and cryptography. In this thesis Atomic frequency comb (AFC) quantum memories were investigated. In particular, three-level memory schemes were investigated in detail and a program for simulating these protocols was developed. These schemes make use of control pulses to transfer the population from the optically excited state to a ground state hyperfine level, as well as radio frequency fields to swap the population in the two ground state hyperfine levels. In this work control and RF pulses, tailored to give good transfer rates, are suggested and effects due to off resonant excitation was investigated. A memory protocol which could give efficiencies up to 60% for Praseodymium doped Yttrium Silicate based AFC memories is proposed. The main bottleneck for reaching higher efficiencies is that the AFC peak spacing needs to be small in order to give enough time to transfer the population to the spin state with the control pulses. With the control pulses suggested in this work and the current technology of tailoring AFC peaks in Pr-based memories, this gives a maximum finesse of 6 of the AFC structure.