Progress in quantum computing
Engineers and physicists at Harvard have managed to capture light in tiny diamond pillars embedded in silver, releasing a stream of single photons at a controllable rate. The advance represents a milestone on the road to quantum networks in which information can be encoded in spins of electrons and carried through a network via light, one photon at a time. The finding was published in Nature Photonics and appeared online on Oct. 9. “We can make the emission of photons faster, which will allow us to do more processing per second — for example, more computations — in the future quantum network,” explains principal investigator Marko Lončar, associate professor of electrical engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The device Lončar’s research team has built consists of parallel rows of tiny, nanofabricated diamond posts, embedded in a layer of silver, each of which can act as a single photon source. By...