Laser-written integrated platform for quantum storage of heralded single photons

Efficient and long-lived interfaces between light and matter are crucial for the development of quantum information technologies. Integrated photonic solutions for quantum storage devices offer improved performances due to light confinement and enable more complex and scalable designs. We demonstrate a novel platform for quantum light storage based on laser written waveguides. The new adopted writing regime allows us to attain waveguides with improved confining capabilities compared to previous demonstrations. We report the first demonstration of single-photon storage in laser written waveguides. While we achieve storage efficiencies comparable to those observed in massive samples, the power involved for the memory preparation is strongly reduced, by a factor 100, due to an enhancement of the light-matter interaction of almost one order of magnitude. Moreover, we demonstrate excited-state storage times 100 times longer than previous realizations with single photons in integrated quantum memories. Our system promises to effectively fulfill the requirements for efficient and scalable integrated quantum storage devices. (c) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement