High Purity Single Photons Entangled with an Atomic Memory

Trapped atomic ions are an ideal candidate for quantum network nodes, with long-lived identical qubit memories that can be locally entangled through their Coulomb interaction and remotely entangled through photonic channels. The integrity of this photonic interface is generally reliant on purity of single photons produced by the quantum memory. Here we demonstrate a single-photon source for quantum networking based on a trapped 138Ba+ ion with a single photon purity of g2(0)=(8.1±2.3)×10−5 without background subtraction. We further optimize the tradeoff between the photonic generation rate and the memory-photon entanglement fidelity for the case of polarization photonic qubits by tailoring the spatial mode of the collected light.