Tuesday, 19 May 2020

New ultra-pure photon sources for quantum applications

The universities of Trento and Bristol have developed a new device that generates single particles of light (photons) to improve quantum information processing

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Architecture, weather forecasts, medical diagnostics, the pharmaceutical industry: in these and other areas, unconventional processing methods are in high demand to develop innovative, accurate and efficient solutions.

Many problems in complex systems, involving millions of variables that are at play based on non-linear dynamics, are behind many natural processes that classic supercomputers are unable to solve efficiently.

The human brain can recognize a face within milliseconds, while a computer takes minutes. The huge gap is in the way in which information is represented and processedQuantum computers can revolutionize this state of things: they can transform the paradigm of "classic" computing and, with quantum mechanics, be able to solve problems intractable on even the most powerful current supercomputers.

A new device that is capable of generating new power for quantum computers fits into this context. The chip, which is a source of photonic qubits (i.e. quantum bits, the basic unit of quantum information) on a silicon integrated circuit, was developed within a collaboration between the universities of Trento and Bristol.

The results of their research work were published in "Nature Communications".

The press release includes comments from Massimo Borghi, Stefano Signorini and Lorenzo Pavesi of UniTrento, who authored the article with the colleagues of the Bristol research team.

About the article
The article "Near-ideal spontaneous photon sources in silicon quantum photonics" was written by Massimo Borghi, Stefano Signorini and Lorenzo Pavesi of the University of Trento with Stefano Paesani, Alexandre Mainos and Anthony Laing of the University of Bristol.
It appeared in "Nature Communications" on 19 May 2020 and is available online 
(DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16187-8)