Hailed as an enabling step along the way to more powerful quantum information processing tools, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light have created a photon gun able to produce single photons of different colors. |
A photon gun capable of reliably producing single photons of different colors has been developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. It could become an important building block of a quantum Internet, Technology Review Physics arXiv blog reports.
The research was published with the title, "A Versatile Source of Single Photons for Quantum Information Processing."
The researchers built a kind of photon supergun: a disc-shaped crystal of lithium niobate zapped with 582nm light from a neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet (Nd:YAG) laser.
Lithium niobate is a nonlinear material that causes single photons to spontaneously convert into photon pairs. That’s significant because the detection of one photon is an unambiguous sign that another has also been emitted. It’s like a time stamp that says a photon is on its way, so there can be no confusion over whether the gun is secretly leaking information to a potential eavesdropper.The gun is also fast, emitting some 10 million pairs of photons per second per mW, and also two orders of magnitude more efficient than other photon guns. The gun can also be tuned to various different atomic transitions, allowing physicists and engineers to play with a variety of different atoms for quantum information storage.
According to the study authors, "This compact source provides unprecedented possibilities to couple to different physical quantum systems and renders it ideal for the implementation of quantum repeaters and optical quantum information processing."
Technology Review cites the research an enabling step along the way to more powerful quantum information processing tools.
SOURCE MIT Technology Review
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