Caltech's Nanophotonic Chip 'Squeezes' More Out of Light
fliptop writes:
Electronic computing and communications have advanced significantly since the days of radio telegraphy and vacuum tubes. In fact, consumer devices now contain levels of processing power and memory that would be unimaginable just a few decades ago.
But as computing and information processing microdevices get ever smaller and more powerful, they are running into some fundamental limits imposed by the laws of quantum physics. Because of this, the future of the field may lie in photonics-the light-based parallel to electronics:
The field is still very active in fundamental research and lacks crucial devices to become practical. A new photonic chip developed at Caltech may represent an important breakthrough for the field, especially for enabling photonic quantum information processors. It can generate and measure quantum states of light in ways previously only possible with bulky and expensive laboratory equipment.
The chip is based on lithium niobite, a salt whose crystals have many applications in optics. It generates what are known as squeezed states of light on one side of the chip and measures them on the other side. A squeezed state of light is, to put it very simply, light when it has been made less "noisy" on the quantum level. Squeezed states of light have recently been used to increase the sensitivity of LIGO, the observatory that uses laser beams to detect gravitational waves. That same less-noisy state of light is important if you are going to process data with light-based quantum devices.
Caltech paper: Few-cycle vacuum squeezing in nanophotonics. Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.
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