- Invisible radar a boost for defence
- Lighting event part of Sydney’s Vivid
- RF switches for an array of applications
- Is a legal dispute with Apple costing chip maker Qualcomm?
AN INTERNATIONAL team of scientists have created entangled photon states with unprecedented complexity on a quantum computing chip.
The researchers were led by Professor David Moss, the newly appointed Director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at Swinburne University of Technology, and Professor Roberto Morandotti from the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS-EMT) in Montreal, Canada.
One key mechanism in quantum technology is entangled particles, which are electrons or photons which remain connected to each other even if they are separated over long distances, so the actions performed by one affect the behaviour of the other.
The research team was about to create entangled photon states with unprecedented complexity and over many parallel channels simultaneously on an integrated chip.
The chip was created using processes that are compatible with the current computer chip industry, making it possible to incorporate quantum devices directly into laptops and phones.
To achieve their goal, the researchers used ‘optical frequency combs’, where pulsed, mode-locked lasers are used to entangle photons.
The researchers achieve a new record in both the number and complexity of entangled photons that can be generated on a chip. This has implications for quantum information processing, imaging and microscopy.
Not only is it now possible to generate entangled photon pairs over hundreds of channels simultaneously, but for the first time the researchers successfully generated four-photon entangled states on a chip.
The breakthrough is the culmination of 10 years of collaborative research on complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) compatible chips for both classical and quantum nonlinear optics.