Abstract

Recently, rare earth doped materials have been considered as promising systems in quantum information processing and communication. The most important property used in this field is the ability for a quantum system to be in a superposition state. Such states can be observed for reasonably long times if the microscopic systems are well isolated from their environment and therefore are characterized by a long dephasing time T₂. Several applications can be considered like quantum cryptography for example. Another application is quantum storage which aims at storing the quantum state of a photon. This is the key to quantum cryptography over long distances.

© 2009 IEEE