The preeminent obstacle to the development of quantum information technology is the difficulty of transmitting quantum information over noisy and lossy quantum communication channels, recovering and refreshing the quantum information that is received, and then storing it in a reliable quantum memory. Under U.S. Army Research Office Grant DAAD19-00-1-0177, “Quantum Information Technology: Entanglement, Teleportation, and Quantum Memory,” a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Northwestern University (NU) have undertaken a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program to overcome this obstacle. In particular:

• We have developed an architecture for long-distance, high-fidelity qubit teleportation that uses a novel ultrabright narrowband source of polarization-entangled photon pairs, and a trapped-atom quantum memory whose loading can be verified nondestructively and whose structure permits all four Bell-state measurements to be performed.
  
  
• We are working to realize all the technology elements to instantiate our quantum communication architecture, including polarization entanglement sources based on parametric amplifiers or fiber Sagnac loops, long-distance entanglement distribution over standard telecom fiber and qubit storage and processing in trapped Rb-atom quantum memories.
  
  
• We are working on a variety of new concepts for quantum communication and memory that should greatly increase the likelihood that quantum information technology will have a practical future.