The 1999 proposal of Woldeyohannes and John showed, within an anisotropic effective-mass model of a photonic band edge, that a coherently driven three-level atom supports a phase-protectable, nondecaying bound-dressed state that can store a qubit, provided the control Rabi frequency exceeds the dephasing rate. Turning this idealized demonstration into a quantitative feasibility assessment for real material hosts requires: a reservoir Green's function computed from a realistic, material-specific anisotropic band structure together with numerical solution of the resulting non-Markovian integrodifferential dynamics; host-specific decoherence budgets relating the control Rabi frequency to actual phonon-induced dephasing rates; materials and placement constraints for three-dimensional photonic band-gap crystals; the effect of many-body and higher-order radiative processes (resonant dipole-dipole photon hopping, cooperative states, two-photon emission, spontaneous harmonic generation) on single-qubit storage and multi-qubit gates; and quantitative lifetimes of bound-dressed states including phonon coupling and second-order radiative channels. Later work has addressed the undriven, two-level portions of this program (realistic local-density-of-states calculations and inhibited-emission experiments in three-dimensional photonic band-gap crystals), while the coherently driven, decoherence-quantified, many-body core remains open.

Background

A photonic band-gap (PBG) material is a dielectric with a periodically varying refractive index on the scale of the optical wavelength, in which Bragg scattering forbids propagation of light in a frequency window (the band gap), much as an electronic band gap forbids electron motion in a crystal. Near the edge of such a gap the photon density of states follows a square-root-like law reminiscent of an electronic band edge, and spontaneous emission, which by Fermi's golden rule is proportional to the density of states at the transition frequency, is strongly slowed and becomes non-exponential. Because the electromagnetic reservoir is no longer broadband and memoryless, the usual Markov approximation of quantum optics fails: the atom obeys an integrodifferential equation whose memory kernel G(t−t′)G(t-t') accumulates emission and reabsorption of virtual photons, producing fractional (power-law) decay and, for transition frequencies inside the gap, a photon-atom bound state in which a photon remains forever localized around the emitter.

Woldeyohannes and John (1999), following the single-atom optical-memory proposal of Quang, Woldeyohannes, John and Agarwal (1997), considered a V-type three-level atom (two upper states ∣2⟩|2\rangle, ∣3⟩|3\rangle and a ground state ∣1⟩|1\rangle) whose ∣3⟩→∣1⟩|3\rangle\to|1\rangle transition lies near an anisotropic band edge, with a continuous-wave control laser of Rabi frequency Ω\Omega (the oscillation frequency of coherent cycling between ∣2⟩|2\rangle and ∣3⟩|3\rangle) coupling the two excited states, and an ultrashort pump pulse preparing a coherent superposition of them. For an anisotropic effective-mass band-edge dispersion, the Laplace transform of the memory kernel is G~(s)=αeiπ/4s−iδ\tilde G(s)=\alpha e^{i\pi/4}\sqrt{s-i\delta}, where α\alpha sets the atom-reservoir coupling strength and δ\delta is the detuning of the atomic transition from the band-edge frequency; the branch point at s=iδs=i\delta generates the long-time reservoir memory. Laplace inversion reveals a discrete dressed-state pole inside the gap, so a finite, fractional excited-state population survives at long times, with the striking feature that the steady state retains memory of the initial relative optical phase between pump and control fields: spontaneous emission can be nearly totally suppressed or strongly enhanced by changing that phase alone. The authors argued that this phase-sensitive, population-trapped superposition is robust to dephasing provided Ω\Omega exceeds the dephasing rate, and proposed the two excited levels as a single-atom qubit (a two-level quantum-information unit) and phase-sensitive optical memory, with candidate hosts being rare-earth ions in silicon, cold atoms trapped in voids of the crystal, or semiconductor quantum dots embedded in the dielectric backbone.

The quantitative skeleton of this argument rests on idealizations: the reservoir Green's function (the function whose imaginary part gives the local density of states and whose branch structure generates the memory kernel) was evaluated for a quadratic effective-mass dispersion valid only asymptotically close to the band edge, and the dephasing simulations used a further-simplified isotropic dispersion. Real three-dimensional photonic crystals, such as silicon inverse woodpiles or diamond-structured crystals, have strongly anisotropic, material-specific band structures, and realistic emitters suffer phonon-induced dephasing and additional radiative channels. The open problem is therefore the quantitative feasibility assessment of the band-edge qubit in realistic hosts, spanning realistic reservoir modeling, decoherence, materials, and many-body effects.

Problem Statement

Determine, quantitatively and in realistic material settings, whether the photonic-band-edge single-atom qubit proposed by Woldeyohannes and John (1999) is realizable and what its performance limits are. The idealized demonstration showed phase-protectable population trapping of a driven three-level atom near an anisotropic band edge, with coherence surviving provided the control Rabi frequency Ω\Omega exceeds the dephasing rate; the open problem is to replace each idealization with realistic physics and to bound the resulting storage and gate performance. The jointly supporting components are: (1) evaluate the reservoir Green's function using a realistic, material-specific anisotropic band structure (beyond the quadratic effective-mass approximation valid only near the band edge) and solve numerically the resulting integrodifferential, non-Markovian dynamics of the driven three-level atom for experimentally realistic parameter sets, including whether the phase-sensitive steady-state trapping and its fractional populations survive, compared with the effective-mass result; (2) quantify implementation-specific decoherence, i.e., compute the control Rabi frequencies required relative to actual phonon-induced dephasing rates in candidate hosts (rare-earth ions in silicon, optically trapped cold atoms in voids, or semiconductor quantum dots embedded in the backbone) with experimental validation of these estimates as a desirable but out-of-scope goal; (3) establish the materials and fabrication conditions for observability, namely three-dimensional photonic crystals with a complete gap at the operating optical frequency (or a sufficiently deep pseudogap at the impurity site) and reliable placement or trapping of single active atoms or quantum dots at controlled sites, under which the bound-dressed state survives; (4) determine the impact on single-qubit storage and multi-qubit gate operation of many-body and higher-order radiative processes, including resonant dipole-dipole photon-hopping conduction between multiple impurity atoms, cooperative entangled many-body states, two-photon emission, and spontaneous harmonic generation mediated by pairs of bound photons; and (5) obtain quantitative lifetime estimates for the bound-dressed states in solid hosts including phonon coupling and second-order radiative channels, together with the scaling of the light-localization length and of the effective interaction strengths with realistic gap-to-midgap ratios. These five components are jointly supporting and combine into a single realizability-and-performance-limits verdict. The feasibility question is posed for the three candidate hosts taken as alternatives.

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