Light is a key information carrier, enabling worldwide, high-speed data transmission through a telecommunication fibre network. This information-carrying capacity can be extended to transmitting quantum information (QI) by encoding it in single photons—flying qubits. However, the various QI-processing platforms operate at vastly different timescales. QI-processing units in atomic media, operating within nanosecond to microsecond timescales, and high-speed quantum communication, at picosecond timescales, cannot be linked efficiently because of the orders-of-magnitude mismatch in the timescales or, correspondingly, spectral linewidths. Here we develop a large-aperture time lens using wide-bandwidth electro-optic phase modulation to bridge this gap. We demonstrate coherent, deterministic spectral bandwidth compression of quantum light pulses by more than two orders of magnitude with high efficiency. This will facilitate large-scale hybrid QI-processing by linking the ultrafast and quasi-continuous-wave experimental platforms, which until now, to a large extent, have been developing independently.

光是一种重要的信息载体，可通过电信光纤网络在全球范围内实现高速数据传输。这种信息承载能力可以扩展到传输量子信息 (QI)，方法是将其编码为单光子——飞行量子比特。然而，各种 QI 处理平台在截然不同的时间尺度上运行。由于时间尺度或相应的光谱线宽的数量级不匹配，原子介质中在纳秒到微秒时间尺度内运行的 QI 处理单元和皮秒时间尺度的高速量子通信无法有效链接。在这里，我们开发了一种使用宽带电光相位调制的大孔径时间镜头来弥补这一差距。我们展示连贯性，量子光脉冲的确定性光谱带宽压缩效率超过两个数量级。这将通过连接超快和准连续波实验平台促进大规模混合 QI 处理，这些平台到目前为止在很大程度上一直是独立开发的。