We report here a portable and robust home-built atom gravimeter (USTC-AG11) continuously working in a seismic station in Zhaotong, Yunnan, for over five months. Based on the principle of matter-wave interference, the atom gravimeter is very sensitive to the local gravity and reaches the precision of micro-Gal (1 x 10-8m/s2) level. With the technique of vibrational compensation, the sensitivity of the atom gravimeter root reaches 38 mu Gal/ Hz, the overall noise level is suppressed by 80% compared to the no-vibration-compensation method, and 95% of the vibration noise is effectively suppressed. The design of the atom gravimeter in the electronics and laser optics, especially the laser frequency and phase auto-relock technology, guarantees long-term continuous running. The long-term precision of the atom gravimeters is better than 2 mu Gal, which is comparable to the best classical gravimeter FG-5(X). Our work provides an application for the high-precision atomic gravimeter based on modern quantum sensing technology in the field of geophysics and geodesy survey.

Atomic gravimetry measures the gravitional acceleration of an ensemble of identical neutral atoms through the atom interferometry based on Raman two-photon transition, where the Raman lasers are used as "optical ruler" and the identical neutral atoms play the role of test mass and quantum storage of gravity field information. As the novel gravimetry system suffers no mechanical wear and works at a higher repetition rate, atom gravimetry can reach a much better short-term sensitivity than the classical falling-corner-cube counterpart, and the accuracy is reasonably well. Since the very first in-laboratory device built over 30 years ago, atomic gravimetry has matured to a versatile tool that offers both precise and accurate absolute gravity measurement to fundamental research and metrology, such as testing the weak equivalence principle or linking the mass and weight of the test mass in Watt (Kibble) balance. As the current rapid development of compact cold-atom gravimeters, atomic gravimetry is moving out of the laboratory to be used as a quantum enhancement of classical devices in dynamical measurement, such as geophysics survey, inertial navigation and space mission. We review the roadmap for the development of cold-atom absolute gravimetry, highlight recent advances in the dynamical measurement using compact cold atom gravimeters and discuss the associated technological challenges. In the future, with the maturity of its application in dynamical measurement or civil engineering and the innovation in atom interferometry theory, atomic gravimetry could play a more and more important role in our life.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) enables secure key exchanges between two remote users. The ultimate goal of secure communication is to establish a global quantum network. The existing field tests suggest that quantum networks are feasible. To achieve a practical quantum network, we need to overcome several challenges including realizing versatile topologies for large scales, simple network maintenance, extendable configuration and robustness to node failures. To this end, we present a field operation of a quantum metropolitan-area network with 46 nodes and show that all these challenges can be overcome with cutting-edge quantum technologies. In particular, we realize different topological structures and continuously run the network for 31 months, by employing standard equipment for network maintenance with an extendable configuration. We realize QKD pairing and key management with a sophisticated key control centre. In this implementation, the final keys have been used for secure communication such as real-time voice telephone, text messaging and file transmission with one-time pad encryption, which can support 11 pairs of users to make audio calls simultaneously. Combined with intercity quantum backbone and ground–satellite links, our metropolitan implementation paves the way toward a global quantum network.

For an atomic gravimeter, the measured value of the Earth’s gravity acceleration g is the projection of the local gravity on the direction of Raman laser beams. To accurately measure the g, the Raman laser beams should be parallel to the g direction. We analyze the tilt effect of the Raman beams on g measurement and present a general method for the tilt adjustment. The systematic error caused by the tilt angle is evaluated as 0 (+0, –0.8) μGal (1μGal = 10 nm/s2) and the drift is also compensated in real time. Our method is especially suitable for the portable atomic gravimeter which focuses on the mobility and field applications.

Compact atomic gravimeters are the potential next generation precision instruments for gravity survey from fundamental research to broad field applications. We report the calibration results of our home build compact absolute atomic gravimeter USTC-AG02 at Changping Campus, the National Institute of Metrology (NIM), China in January 2019. The sensitivity of the atomic gravimeter reaches 35.5 μ Gal / Hz (1 μGal = 1 × 10−8 m/s2) and its long-term stability reaches 0.8 μGal for averaging over 4000 seconds. Considering the statistical uncertainty, the dominant instrumental systematic errors and environmental effects are evaluated and corrected within a total uncertainty (2σ) of 15.3 μGal. After compared with the reference g value given by the corner cube gravimeter NIM-3A, the atomic gravimeter USTC-AG02 reaches the degree of equivalence of 3.7 μGal.

The gravimeter based on atom interferometry has potential wide applications on building gravity networks and geophysics as well as gravity assisted navigation. Here, we demonstrate experimentally a portable atomic gravimeter operating in the noisy urban environment. Despite the influence of noisy external vibrations, our portable atomic gravimeter reaches a sensitivity as good as 65 mu Gal/root Hz and a resolution of 1.1 mu Gal after 4000 s integration, being comparable to state-of-the-art atomic gravimeters. Our achievement paves the way for bringing the portable atomic gravimeter to field applications.

惯性技术因其强自主性、不依赖外界信号、适应全天候等特性在导航领域备受关注,为了提升惯性导航的精度,数十年来人们在如何提高惯性传感器性能方面进行了大量的攻关工作并研制出了多种基于不同原理的惯性传感器。得益于量子效应,原子传感器能在诸如时间、加速度、转动、磁场等领域提供比现有技术更高的测量灵敏度、精度和速度。通过研制基于原子干涉技术的高精度原子惯性器件,实现重力/重力梯度数据实时补偿匹配的量子导航将是新一代高精准军用惯性导航的首选。本文简要介绍了以物质波干涉为基础的原子干涉惯性器件的原理,回顾了以原子重力仪、原子干涉陀螺为主的技术发展历程及现状,并结合我国目前在该领域的发展态势,表达了对我国原子惯性设备实装应用的迫切性。

Vibration noise has an influence on the sensitivity and stability for many precision instruments, especially for atom interferometers. In this paper, a mobile three-dimensional active vibration isolation system is established for portable atom interferometer that is effectively isolated from the ground vibration, thereby improving the sensitivity of the portable atom interferometer, and can be deployed and recovered to working state rapidly. With the home-developed integrated feedback algorithm, this system achieves a good vibration suppression in a wide frequency range in three directions. It suppresses the ground vibration by three orders of magnitude in the vertical direction, and one order of magnitude in the horizontal direction. In a frequency range less than 10 Hz which the atom interferometer is sensitive to, the vibration noise is suppressed to 4.8 × 10–9 m/s2/Hz1/2 in the vertical direction and to 2.7 × 10–7 m/s2/Hz1/2 in the horizontal direction. The influence of vibration noise on the sensitivity of the atom interferometer reaches to 2 μGal/Hz1/2, which is reduced by two orders of magnitude compared with the result without our system.

We report a an experimental study of device-independent quantum random number generation based on an detection-loophole free Bell test with entangled photons. After considering statistical fluctuations and applying an 80 Gb × 45.6 Mb Toeplitz matrix hashing, we achieve a final random bit rate of 114 bits/s, with a failure probability less than 10−5.

Creating large-scale entanglement lies at the heart of many quantum information processing protocols and the investigation of fundamental physics. For multipartite quantum systems, it is crucial to identify not only the presence of entanglement but also its detailed structure. This is because in a generic experimental situation with sufficiently many subsystems involved, the production of so-called genuine multipartite entanglement remains a formidable challenge. Consequently, focusing exclusively on the identification of this strongest type of entanglement may result in an all or nothing situation where some inherently quantum aspects of the resource are overlooked. On the contrary, even if the system is not genuinely multipartite entangled, there may still be many-body entanglement present in the system. An identification of the entanglement structure may thus provide us with a hint about where imperfections in the setup may occur, as well as where we can identify groups of subsystems that can still exhibit strong quantum-information-processing capabilities. However, there is no known efficient methods to identify the underlying entanglement structure. Here, we propose two complementary families of witnesses for the identification of such structures. They are based, respectively, on the detection of entanglement intactness and entanglement depth, each applicable to an arbitrary number of subsystems and whose evaluation requires only the implementation of solely two local measurements. Our method is also robust against noises and other imperfections, as reflected by our experimental implementation of these tools to verify the entanglement structure of five different eight-photon entangled states. In particular, we demonstrate how their entanglement structure can be precisely and systematically inferred from the experimental measurement of these witnesses. In achieving this goal, we also illustrate how the same set of data can be classically postprocessed to learn the most about the measured system.

Silicon single-photon detectors (SPDs) are the key devices for detecting single photons in the visible wavelength range. Here we present high detection efficiency silicon SPDs dedicated to the generation of multiphoton entanglement based on the technique of high-frequency sine wave gating. The silicon single-photon avalanche diode components are acquired by disassembling 6 commercial single-photon counting modules (SPCMs). Using the new quenching electronics, the average detection efficiency of SPDs is increased from 68.6% to 73.1% at a wavelength of 785 nm. These sine wave gating SPDs are then applied in a four-photon entanglement experiment, and the four-fold coincidence count rate is increased by 30% without degrading its visibility compared with the original SPCMs.

Coherently manipulating a number of entangled qubits is the key task of quantum information processing. In this paper, we report on the experimental realization of a ten-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state using thin BiB3O6 crystals. The observed fidelity is 0.606 +/- 0.029, demonstrating a genuine entanglement with a standard deviation of 3.6 sigma. This result is further verified using p-value calculation, obtaining an upper bound of 3.7 x 10(-3) under an assumed hypothesis test. Our experiment paves a new way to efficiently engineer BiB3O6 crystal-based multi-photon entanglement systems, which provides a promising platform for investigating advanced optical quantum information processing tasks such as boson sampling, quantum error correction, and quantum-enhanced measurement. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America

We experimentally demonstrate a self-testing quantum random number generation based on an detection-loophole free Bell test with entangled photons. We achieve a final random bit rate of 114 bits/s, with a failure probability less than 10−5.

Quantum simulation is of great importance in quantum information science. Here, we report an experimental quantum channel simulator imbued with an algorithm for imitating the behavior of a general class of quantum systems. The reported quantum channel simulator consists of four single-qubit gates and one controlled-NOT gate. All types of quantum channels can be decomposed by the algorithm and implemented on this device. We deploy our system to simulate various quantum channels, such as quantum-noise channels and weak quantum measurement. Our results advance experimental quantum channel simulation, which is integral to the goal of quantum information processing.

Quantum repeaters play a significant role in achieving long-distance quantum communication. In the past decades, tremendous effort has been devoted towards constructing a quantum repeater. As one of the crucial elements, entanglement has been created in different memory systems via entanglement swapping. The realization of j-hierarchy entanglement swapping, i.e., connecting quantum memory and further extending the communication distance, is important for implementing a practical quantum repeater. Here, we report the first demonstration of a fault-tolerant two-hierarchy entanglement swapping with linear optics using parametric down-conversion sources. In the experiment, the dominant or most probable noise terms in the one-hierarchy entanglement swapping, which is on the same order of magnitude as the desired state and prevents further entanglement connections, are automatically washed out by a proper design of the detection setting, and the communication distance can be extended. Given suitable quantum memory, our techniques can be directly applied to implementing an atomic ensemble based quantum repeater, and are of significant importance in the scalable quantum information processing.

Quantum repeaters 1 – 4 are essential elements for demonstrating global-scale quantum communication. Over the past few decades, tremendous efforts have been dedicated to implementing a practical quantum repeater 5 – 10 . However, nested purification 1 , the backbone of a quantum repeater, remains a challenge because the capacity for successive entanglement manipulation is still absent. Here, we propose and demonstrate an architecture of nested purification using spontaneous parametric downconversion sources 11 . A heralded entangled photon pair with higher fidelity is successfully purified from two copies of low-fidelity pairs that experience entanglement swapping and noisy channels. By delicately designing the optical circuits, double-pair emission noise is eliminated automatically and the purified state can be used for scalable entanglement connections to extend the communication distance. Combined with a quantum memory, our approach can be applied immediately in the implemention of a practical quantum repeater.

Secret sharing of a quantum state, or quantum secret sharing, in which a dealer wants to share a certain amount of quantum information with a few players, has wide applications in quantum information. The critical criterion in a threshold secret sharing scheme is confidentiality: with less than the designated number of players, no information can be recovered. Furthermore, in a quantum scenario, one additional critical criterion exists: the capability of sharing entangled and unknown quantum information. Here, by employing a six-photon entangled state, we demonstrate a quantum threshold scheme, where the shared quantum secrecy can be efficiently reconstructed with a state fidelity as high as 93%. By observing that any one or two parties cannot recover the secrecy, we show that our scheme meets the confidentiality criterion. Meanwhile, we also demonstrate that entangled quantum information can be shared and recovered via our setting, which shows that our implemented scheme is fully quantum. Moreover, our experimental setup can be treated as a decoding circuit of the five-qubit quantum error-correcting code with two erasure errors.

We report the first experimental demonstration of quantum entanglement among ten spatially separated single photons. A near-optimal entangled photon-pair source was developed with simultaneously a source brightness of ∼12  MHz/W, a collection efficiency of ∼70%, and an indistinguishability of ∼91% between independent photons, which was used for a step-by-step engineering of multiphoton entanglement. Under a pump power of 0.57 W, the ten-photon count rate was increased by about 2 orders of magnitude compared to previous experiments, while maintaining a state fidelity sufficiently high for proving the genuine ten-particle entanglement. Our work created a state-of-the-art platform for multiphoton experiments, and enabled technologies for challenging optical quantum information tasks, such as the realization of Shor's error correction code and high-efficiency scattershot boson sampling.

We demonstrate the realization of quantum key distribution (QKD) when combined with classical optical communication, and synchronous signals within a single optical fiber. In the experiment, the classical communication sources use Fabry-Pérot (FP) lasers, which are implemented extensively in optical access networks. To perform QKD, multistage band-stop filtering techniques are developed, and a wavelength-division multiplexing scheme is designed for the multi-longitudinal-mode FP lasers. We have managed to maintain sufficient isolation among the quantum channel, the synchronous channel and the classical channels to guarantee good QKD performance. Finally, the quantum bit error rate remains below a level of 2% across the entire practical application range. The proposed multiplexing scheme can ensure low classical light loss, and enables QKD over fiber lengths of up to 45 km simultaneously when the fibers are populated with bidirectional FP laser communications. Our demonstration paves the way for application of QKD to current optical access networks, where FP lasers are widely used by the end users.

Nature Photon. 8, 364–368 (2014); published online: 20 April 2014; corrected after print: 20 April 2014 In the version of this Letter originally published in print, the following mathematical expressions were formatted incorrectly. On page 1, column 1, paragraph 2, line 2, the two symbols “N” shouldnot be superscripted relative to the symbol “⊗”.