Giant optical Faraday rotation induced by a single-electron spin in a quantum dot: Applications to entangling remote spins via a single photon

Abstract

We propose a quantum nondemolition method—a giant optical Faraday rotation near the resonant regime to measure a single-electron spin in a quantum dot inside a microcavity where a negatively charged exciton strongly couples to the cavity mode. Left-circularly and right-circularly polarized lights reflected from the cavity obtain different phase shifts due to cavity quantum electrodynamics and the optical spin selection rule. This yields giant and tunable Faraday rotation that can be easily detected experimentally. Based on this spin-detection technique, a deterministic photon-spin entangling gate and a scalable scheme to create remote spin entanglement via a single photon are proposed.