The present thesis includes a series of experiments exploring the potential of using rare-earth ion-doped crystals as a light-matter quantum interface using different quantum states of light as a probe resource. We start with the realization of an elementary quantum repeater block, implementing quantum teleportation of a polarization qubit into a solid-state quantum memory based on a yttrium-orthosilicate crystal doped with neodymium ions. The storage of an hyperentangled state of light compatible with long-distance quantum communication was demonstrated to show the potential of using this quantum memory for quantum purification techniques. To explore the temporal multiplexing capability of atomic frequency combs in atomic ensembles we performed temporal multimode storage of multi-photon entangled state of light. Such a temporal multimode capacity together with the developed novel theoretical techniques allowed us to show the storage of more than one bit of entanglement (ebit) using multi-photon and multi-dimensional entangled photon states.