Engineers and physicists at Harvard have managed to capture light in tiny diamond pillars embedded in silver, releasing a stream of single photons at a controllable rate.
The advance represents a milestone on the road to quantum networks in which information can be encoded in spins of electrons and carried through a network via light, one photon at a time.
The finding was published in Nature Photonics, appearing online on October 9.
“We can make the emission of photons faster, which will allow us to do more processing per second—for example, more computations—in the future quantum network,” explains principal investigator Marko Lon?ar, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
The device Lon?ar's research team has built consists of parallel rows of tiny, nanofabricated diamond posts, embedded in a layer of silver, that can each act as a single photon source.
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