Since the era of wireless telegraph and vacuum tube , electronic computing and communication have made significant progress. In fact, the processing power and memory levels achieved by current consumer devices were unimaginable decades ago. But as computing and information processing micro-device become smaller and stronger, these devices are encountering some basic limitations imposed by the laws of quantum physics.
Because of these limitations, photonics may be one of the breakthroughs in the future. Photonics is theoretically similar to electronics, but uses photon instead of electrons. They have huge potential advantages because photonic devices may process data much faster than electronic devices, including quantum computer .
At present, although basic research in this field is very active, it lacks the key equipment required for practicality. However, the new photonic chip developed by Caltech may represent a major breakthrough in this field, especially in enabling photonic quantum information processors. It can generate and measure quantum state of light, which was previously possible only with bulky and expensive laboratory equipment.
Nibodyne lithium is a salt, its crystal has many applications in optics and is the basis of the chip. One side of the chip produces a so-called light compression state and takes measurements on the other side. The compressed state of light, simply put, is to reduce "noise" light at the quantum level. Light in compressed state has recently been used to increase the sensitivity of LIGO, an observatory that uses laser beams to detect gravitational waves. If you are using light-based quantum devices to process data, then the same low-noise light state is also important.
Alireza Marandi said: "The mass of quantum states we achieve exceeds the requirements of quantum information processing, which was once the field of huge experimental devices. Our work marks an important step in generating and measuring optical quantum states in integrated photon circuits."
Marandi said this technology points the way forward for the final development of quantum optical processors running at terahertz clock rates. By comparison, this is thousands of times faster than the microelectronics processors in MacBookPro. Marandi said the technology has the potential to find practical uses in communications, sensing and quantum computing over the next five years.
