The race towards quantum computing is heating up. Faster, brighter, more exacting – these are all terms that could be applied as much to the actual science as to the research effort going on in labs around the globe.
Quantum technologies are poised to provide exponentially stronger computational power and secured communications. But the bar is high – advances are hard won and competition is intense.
At the forefront of the candidates to implement such technologies is the field of quantum photonics, particularly light sources that emit photons one at a time to be used as carriers of information.
Quantum technologies require the quantum analogue to the classical “information bit” that is used to encode zeros and ones, and a means to transfer the information. Photons can do both. Single photon sources, such as point defects in solids, can be used as quantum bits. Photons generated by the defects can then carry the information from node to node, in a similar way to conventional integrated circuits. The challenge is: how to find and engineer those sources.
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