Photon-to-electron quantum information transfer

Spin is a fundamental property of electrons and plays an important role in information storage. For spin-based quantum information technology, preparation and read-out of the electron spin state must be spin coherent, but both the traditional preparation and read-out of the spin state are projective to up/down spin states, which do not have spin coherence. We have recently demonstrated that the polarization coherence of light can be coherently transferred to the spin coherence of electrons in a semiconductor. We have also developed a new scheme named tomographic Kerr rotation (TKR) by generalizing the traditional KR to directly read out the spin coherence of optically prepared electrons without the need for the spin dynamics, which allows the spin projection measurement in an arbitrary set of basis states. These demonstrations were performed using g-factor-controlled semiconductor quantum wells with precessing and non-precessing electrons. The developed scheme offers a tool for performing basis-independent preparation and read-out of a spin quantum state in a solid. These results encourage us to make a quantum media converter between flying photon qubits and stationary electron spin qubits in semiconductors.