Electronic computing and communications have reportedly come a long way since the advent of wireless telegraphy and vacuum tubes, and today’s consumer devices have levels of processing power and memory that were unimaginable just a few decades ago …… But as computing and information processing devices become smaller and more powerful, they are encountering the laws of quantum physics imposing Some fundamental limitations, future prospects for the field may be closely related to photonics, the fundamental concept of optics parallel to electronics, which is theoretically similar to electronics but uses photons instead of electrons, and photonic devices that may process data much faster than electronic devices, including quantum computers.
The development of a new photonic chip at Caltech could represent a major breakthrough in the field, particularly in terms of making it possible to generate and measure photonic quantum states in a way that was previously only possible using bulky and expensive laboratory equipment.
Based on the fundamental nature of photons, different types of photons are distinguished by their characteristics such as energy, momentum and polarisation, and the photonic states determined by these different characteristics are called photonic quantum states.
The new photonic chip is based on lithium niobate, a material with a wide range of uses in optics, which produces a so-called light-compressed state on one side of the chip and measures it on the other. The light-compressed state, which simply means light with reduced “noise” on a quantum scale, has not been known to be used until recent years to enhance sensitivity surveys at the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), a detection device that uses laser beams to detect gravitational waves, and if scientists use light-based If scientists use light-based quantum devices to process the data, the same low-noise optical state is also important.
Alireza Marandi, associate professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Caltech, said: “Now that we have achieved a quantum state quality that exceeds the needs of quantum information processing, which can be used in scientific research areas dealing with large experimental installations, our research work marks an integrated photonic circuit to generate and measure optical quantum states is an important step forward. We can use it to break through many of the limitations of traditional nonlinear optics research and even break many conventional assumptions.”
Meanwhile, Marandi noted that the photonic chip technology shows a pathway to the ultimate development of quantum optical processors running at terahertz clock rates, which in comparison are thousands of times faster than the computing processor in Apple’s laptop MacBook Pro, and that the technology could be put to practical use in communications, sensing and quantum computing within the next five years.
Rajveer Nehra, a postdoctoral scholar and co-author of the study, said: “Optics has been one of the most promising avenues for achieving quantum computing because it has some inherent advantages in terms of scalability and ultrafast logic operation at room temperature, however, one of the main challenges for scalable applications is the generation and measurement in nanophotonics sufficient quantum states, and we aim to address this challenging issue.”
