Coherent and passive one dimensional quantum memory

Abstract

We show that the state of a flying qubit may be transferred to a chain of identical, (near) ferromagnetically polarized, but non-interacting, static spin-1/2 particles in a passive way. During this process the flying qubit is coherently polarized, emerging in the direction of the majority static spins. We conjecture that this process is reversible for any number of flying qubits injected sequentially in an arbitrary superposition state, proving this explicitly for an arbitrary state of one and two flying qubits. We also find a special case in which we are able to prove the conjecture for an arbitrary number of qubits. Our architecture thus has the potential to be exploited as a passive quantum memory to encode the flying qubits without the necessity of resetting between successive encoding operations. We also illustrate that the quantum information may be spread over many static spins in the memory chain, making the mechanism resistant to spin decoherence and other imperfections. We discuss implementing the memory system with trapped bosonic atoms, controlled by a spatial light modulator.