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Silicon carbide (SiC) is the leading wide-bandgap semiconductor material, providing mature doping and device fabrication. Additionally, SiC hosts a multitude of optically active point defects (color centers), it is an excellent material for optical resonators due to its high refractive index and an outstanding material for mechanical resonators due to its high Q/f product. Moreover, epitaxial graphene layers can be grown as ultrathin electrodes and provide the potential to fine-tune color center resonances. These characteristics render SiC an ideal platform for experiments with single color centers towards quantum technologies including coupling color centers towards cooperative effects. A crucial step towards harnessing the full potential of the SiC platform includes technologies to create color centers with defined localization and density, e.g.\ to facilitate their coupling to nano-photonic structures and to observe cooperative effects. Here, silicon vacancy centers (V$_{Si}$) stand out as no impurity atom is needed and high-thermal budget annealing steps can be avoided. We characterize the effect of localized, femtosecond laser irradiation of SiC, investigating surface modifications and photoluminescence including Raman spectroscopy and optical lifetime measurements., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures

Interacting resonators can lead to strong non-linearities but the details can be complicated to predict. In this work, we study the non-linearities introduced by two nested microcavities that interact with nitrogen vacancy centers in a diamond waveguide. Each cavity has differently designed resonance; one in the green and one in the infrared. The magnetic-field dependence of the nitrogen vacancy center absorption rates on the green and the recently observed infrared transitions allows us to propose a scalable on-chip magnetometer that combines high magnetic-field sensitivity and micrometer spatial resolution. By investigating the system behaviors over several intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, we explain the main non-linearities induced by the NV centers and enhanced by the cavities. We finally show that the cavities can improve the magnetic-field sensitivity by up to two orders of magnitudes.

We demonstrate a concept for post-growth symmetry control in oxide heterostructures. A functional oxide is sandwiched between two ferroelectric layers and inversion symmetry at the position of the oxide constituent is reversibly switched on or off by layer-selective electric-field poling. The functionality of this process is monitored by optical second harmonic generation. The generalization of our approach to other materials and symmetries is considered. We thus establish ferroic trilayer structures as device components in which symmetry-driven charge-, spin-, and strain-related functionalities can be activated and deactivated at will.

We describe an ion-based cavity-QED system in which the internal dynamics of an atom is coupled to the modes of an optical cavity by vacuum-stimulated Raman transitions. We observe Raman spectra for different excitation polarizations and find quantitative agreement with theoretical simulations. Residual motion of the ion introduces motional sidebands in the Raman spectrum and leads to ion delocalization. The system offers prospects for cavity-assisted resolved-sideband ground-state cooling and coherent manipulation of ions and photons., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures

Among the various kinds of entangled states, the 'W state' plays an important role as its entanglement is maximally persistent and robust even under particle loss. Such states are central as a resource in quantum information processing and multiparty quantum communication. Here we report the scalable and deterministic generation of four-, five-, six-, seven- and eight-particle entangled states of the W type with trapped ions. We obtain the maximum possible information on these states by performing full characterization via state tomography, using individual control and detection of the ions. A detailed analysis proves that the entanglement is genuine. The availability of such multiparticle entangled states, together with full information in the form of their density matrices, creates a test-bed for theoretical studies of multiparticle entanglement. Independently, -Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger- entangled states with up to six ions have been created and analysed in Boulder.

It is common belief among physicists that entangled states of quantum systems loose their coherence rather quickly. The reason is that any interaction with the environment which distinguishes between the entangled sub-systems collapses the quantum state. Here we investigate entangled states of two trapped Ca$^+$ ions and observe robust entanglement lasting for more than 20 seconds.

We report measurements of the lifetimes of the 3d $^2$D$_{5/2}$ and 3d $^2$D$_{3/2}$ metastable states of a single laser-cooled $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ion in a linear Paul trap. We introduce a new measurement technique based on high-efficiency quantum state detection after coherent excitation to the D$_{5/2}$ state or incoherent shelving in the D$_{3/2}$ state, and subsequent free, unperturbed spontaneous decay. The result for the natural lifetime of the D$_{5/2}$ state of 1168(9) ms agrees excellently with the most precise published value. The lifetime of the D$_{3/2}$ state is measured with a single ion for the first time and yields 1176(11) ms which improves the statistical uncertainty of previous results by a factor of four. We compare these experimental lifetimes to high-precision ab initio all order calculations and find a very good agreement. These calculations represent an excellent test of high-precision atomic theory and will serve as a benchmark for the study of parity nonconservation in Ba$^+$ which has similar atomic structure., Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures

We report the realization of an elementary quantum processor based on a linear crystal of trapped ions. Each ion serves as a quantum bit (qubit) to store the quantum information in long lived electronic states. We present the realization of single-qubit and of universal two-qubit logic gates. The qwo-qubit operation relies on the coupling of the ions through their collective quantized motion. A detailed description of the setup and the methods is included., Comment: More detailed information as compared to Schmidt-Kaler et al., nature 422,408 (2003)

A single 40Ca+ ion is trapped and laser cooled to its motional ground state. Laser radiation which couples off-resonantly to a motional sideband of the ion's S1/2 to D5/2 transition causes a phase shift proportional to the ion's motional quantum state |n>. As the phase shift is conditional upon the ion's motion, we are able to demonstrate a universal 2-qubit quantum gate operation where the electronic target state {S,D} is flipped depending on the motional qubit state |n>={|0>,|1>}. Finally, we discuss scaling properties of this universal quantum gate for linear ion crystals and present numerical simulations for the generation of a maximally entangled state of five ions.

We report on tomographic means to study the stability of a qubit register based on a string of trapped ions. In our experiment, two ions are held in a linear Paul trap and are entangled deterministically by laser pulses that couple their electronic and motional states. We reconstruct the density matrix using single qubit rotations and subsequent measurements with near-unity detection efficiency. This way, we characterize the created Bell states, the states into which they subsequently decay, and we derive their entanglement, applying different entanglement measures.

A distant mirror leads to a vacuum-induced level shift in a laser-excited atom. This effect has been measured with a single mirror 25 cm away from a single, trapped barium ion. This dispersive action is the counterpart to the mirror's dissipative effect, which has been shown earlier to effect a change in the ion's spontaneous decay [J. Eschner et al., Nature 413, 495-498 (2001)]. The experimental data are well described by 8-level optical Bloch equations which are amended to take into account the presence of the mirror according to the model in [U. Dorner and P. Zoller, Phys. Rev. A 66, 023816 (2002)]. Observed deviations from simple dispersive behavior are attributed to multi-level effects., Comment: version accepted by PRL

Using optical Ramsey interferometry, we precisely measure the laser-induced AC-stark shift on the $S_{1/2}$ -- $D_{5/2}$ "quantum bit" transition near 729 nm in a single trapped $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ion. We cancel this shift using an additional laser field. This technique is of particular importance for the implementation of quantum information processing with cold trapped ions. As a simple application we measure the atomic phase evolution during a $n \times 2\pi$ rotation of the quantum bit., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures

Two-level ionic systems, where quantum information is encoded in long lived states (qubits), are discussed extensively for quantum information processing. We present a collection of measurements which characterize the stability of a qubit based on the $S_{1/2}$--$D_{5/2}$ transition of single $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ions in a linear Paul trap. We find coherence times of $\simeq$1 ms, discuss the main technical limitations and outline possible improvements., Comment: Proceedings of "Trapped charged particles and fundamental interactions" submitted to Journal of Physics B (IoP)

The quadrupole S$_{1/2}$ -- D$_{5/2}$ optical transition of a single trapped Ca$^+$ ion, well suited for encoding a quantum bit of information, is coherently coupled to the standing wave field of a high finesse cavity. The coupling is verified by observing the ion's response to both spatial and temporal variations of the intracavity field. We also achieve deterministic coupling of the cavity mode to the ion's vibrational state by selectively exciting vibrational state-changing transitions and by controlling the position of the ion in the standing wave field with nanometer-precision.

We report photon correlation measurements that allow us to observe unique signatures of biexcitons in a single self-assembled InAs quantum dot. Photon correlation measurements of biexciton emission exhibit both bunching and antibunching under continuous-wave excitation while only antibunching is observed under pulsed excitation. Cross-correlation between biexciton and single-exciton peaks reveal highly asymmetric features, demonstrating that biexciton and exciton emissions have strong correlations due to cascaded emission. The anticipated correlation between the polarization of exciton and biexciton emissions however, is absent under our excitation conditions. Photon correlation measurements also provide evidence for the identification of the charged exciton emission.