Qubit entanglement generated by classical light driving an optical cavity

Abstract

We study the generation of entanglement between two qubits which communicate through a single cavity mode of quantum light but have no direct interaction. We show that such entanglement can be generated simply by exchanging quanta with a third party, which is in our case the cavity mode. Exchanging only a single quantum creates maximal entanglement. A single quantum can be provided by an external quantum light source. However, we use a classical light source to pump quanta which are used for the exchange, and investigate the degree of two-qubit entanglement. We first identify a characteristic timescale of the interaction between the cavity mode and each qubit. We investigate two regimes of the driving pulse length: one is short and the other is long compared to the characteristic timescale of the interaction. In the first regime, it is known that the pulse can pump the system by generating a displacement of the cavity mode. We show that, by using a specific pulse shape, one can make the displacement essentially vanish after the pulse finishes interaction with the cavity mode. In this case, a rotation of the qubits can be invoked. In addition, higher-order effects of the pulse including a nonlocal operation on the joint system of the cavity mode and the qubits are found, and we present a formalism to compute each term up to a given order. An explicit condition on the pulse shape for each term to be nonzero or suppressed is derived to enable an experimental design for verifying the entanglement generation using a classical light source. In the opposite regime where the driving is sufficiently long, we utilize a squeezed state which may be obtained adiabatically. We study how the squeezing and the accompanied rotation of qubits affect the generated two-qubit entanglement.