Towards deterministic optical quantum computation with coherently driven atomic ensembles

Scalable and efficient quantum computation with photonic qubits requires (i) deterministic sources of single photons, (ii) giant nonlinearities capable of entangling pairs of photons, and (iii) reliable single-photon detectors. In addition, an optical quantum computer would need a robust reversible photon storage device. Here we discuss several related techniques, based on the coherent manipulation of atomic ensembles in the regime of electromagnetically induced transparency, that are capable of implementing all of the above prerequisites for deterministic optical quantum computation with single photons.