Quantum Metasurfaces with Atom Arrays

Abstract

Metasurfaces mold the flow of classical light waves by engineering sub-wavelength patterns from dielectric or metallic thin films. We introduce and analyze a method in which quantum operator-valued reflectivity can be used to control both spatio-temporal and quantum properties of transmitted and reflected light. Such quantum metasurfaces are realized by entangling the macroscopic response of atomically thin atom arrays to light. We show that such a system allows for parallel quantum operations between atoms and photons as well as for the generation of highly entangled photonic states such as photonic GHZ and three-dimensional cluster states suitable for quantum information processing. We analyze the influence of imperfections as well as specific implementations based on atom arrays excited into Rydberg states