Precisely controlling the reflection phase of a photon via a strongly-coupled ancilla dressed qubit

Abstract

We propose that Rydberg dressing of a single qubit atom can be used to control a surrounding ensemble of three-level atoms and hereby the phase of light reflected by an optical cavity. Our scheme employs an ensemble dark resonance that is perturbed by the qubit state of a single atom to yield a single-atom single-photon gate. We show here that off-resonant Rydberg dressing of the qubit offers experimentally-viable regimes of operation that drastically reduce error compared to schemes using shelved Rydberg population. Such low errors (in the $10^{-3}$ range) are a necessary condition for fault-tolerant optical-photon, gate-based quantum computation. We also demonstrate the technique for microwave circuit-QED, where a strongly-coupled ancilla superconducting qubit can be used in the place of the atomic ensemble to provide high-fidelity coupling to microwave photons.