Research Highlight

Weaving Quantum Processors Out of Laser Light

Entanglement
Structure (a visualization)
The entanglement structure of a large-scale quantum processor made of light.
Credit: Shota Yokoyama 2019

An international team of scientists from Australia, Japan and the United States, including our postdoc Rafael Alexander and UNM alum Nic Menicucci, has produced a prototype of a large-scale quantum processor made of laser light.

Optical Device Network
A network of optical devices -- mirrors, beamsplitters, and optical fibres -- weave laser light into an optical quantum processor.
Credit: CQC2T

Based on a design ten years in the making, the processor has built-in scalability that allows the number of quantum components—made out of light—to scale to extreme numbers. The research was published in Science recently.

Menicucci and Alexander

See the article Generation of time-domain-multiplexed two-dimensional cluster state in Science and the press release aimed at the general public.