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  • Open Access

Cavity optomechanical quantum memory for twisted photons using a ring Bose-Einstein condensate

Nilamoni Daloi1,*,†, Rahul Gupta2,*,‡, Aritra Ghosh1,3, Pardeep Kumar4,§, Himadri S. Dhar2,5, and M. Bhattacharya1

  • * These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Contact author: nilamoni123@gmail.com
  • ‡Contact author: rahul.quantumfield@iitb.ac.in
  • §Contact author: pardeep.kumar@mpl.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 013013 – Published 9 January, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/zd1d-39d7

Abstract

We theoretically propose a photonic orbital angular momentum quantum memory, currently of great interest from the perspective of quantum networks, based on a ring-trapped Bose-Einstein condensate interacting with Laguerre-Gaussian beams. The optical states are stored in the large Hilbert space of topologically protected persistent currents of the condensate. In contrast to earlier work, our proposal uses a cavity, which enhances the light-matter interaction by several orders of magnitude, resulting in high fidelity, convenient detection, and no need to repeat read-write cycles degraded by atom loss. Our scheme avoids using multiple internal atomic states as in generic electromagnetically induced transparency-based protocols and thus bypasses problems like off-resonant photoassociation by the control fields and dephasing effects that limit memory storage time. For optimized parameters, our work yields a storage time 3 orders of magnitude better than presently available and opens the way for exploiting existing advantages of cavity-based noise suppression, wavelength transduction, large bandwidth, and nondestructive readout of the memory.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 013013– Published 9 January, 2026
  • Received 14 June 2025
  • Accepted 15 December 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by Max Planck Society.

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