Transcript
The microprocessor inside a computer is a single multipurpose chip that has revolutionized people's lives, allowing them to use one machine to surf the Web, check emails and keep track of finances.
Now, researchers from the University of Bristol in the UK and NTT in Japan have pulled off the same feat for light in the quantum world by developing an optical chip that can process photons in an infinite number of ways.
It's a major step toward creating a quantum computer to solve problems such as designing new drugs, superfast database searches, and solving otherwise intractable mathematics problems that aren't possible for super computers.
As described recently in the journal Science, the fully reprogrammable chip brings together a multitude of existing quantum experiments and can realize a plethora of future protocols that have not even been conceived yet.
It marks a new era of research for quantum scientists and engineers at the cutting edge of quantum technologies. A major barrier in testing new theories for quantum science and quantum computing is the time and resources needed to build new experiments, which are typically extremely demanding due to the notoriously fragile nature of quantum systems.
This new device represents a step-change for experiments with photons, and what the future looks like for quantum technologies. A whole field of research has essentially been put onto a single optical chip that is easily controlled.
The implications of the work go beyond the huge resource savings. Now anybody can run experiments with photons, much like they operate any other piece of software on a computer. They no longer need to convince a physicist to devote many months of their life to painstakingly build and conduct a new experiment.
The team demonstrated the chip's unique capabilities by reprogramming it to rapidly perform a number of different experiments, each of which would previously have taken many months to build.
As one of the researchers explained: "Once we wrote the code for each circuit, it took seconds to reprogram the chip, and milliseconds for the chip to switch to the new experiment. We carried out a year's worth of experiments in a matter of hours. What we're really excited about is using these chips to discover new science that we haven't even thought of yet."
|
