Interfacing GHz-bandwidth heralded single photons with a   room-temperature Raman quantum memory
  Photonics is a promising platform for quantum technologies. However, photon sources and two-photon gates currently only operate probabilistically. Large-scale photonic processing will therefore be impossible without a multiplexing strategy to actively select successful events. High time-bandwidth-product quantum memories - devices that store and retrieve single photons on-demand - provide an efficient remedy via active synchronisation. Here we interface a GHz-bandwidth heralded single-photon source and a room-temperature Raman memory with a time-bandwidth product exceeding 1000. We store heralded single photons and observe a clear influence of the input photon statistics on the retrieved light, which agrees with our theoretical model. The preservation of the stored field's statistics is limited by four-wave-mixing noise, which we identify as the key remaining challenge in the development of practical memories for scalable photonic information processing. 
P. S. Michelberger, T. F. M. Champion, M. R. Sprague, K. T. Kaczmarek,   M. Barbieri, X. M. Jin, D. G. England, W. S. Koltha...
quant-ph