A breakthrough discovery, Through the quantum mirror, could make computing, sensing and encryption technologies smaller and more powerful by helping scientists control the surprising and useful properties of quantum mechanics, according to new research published in recently in the journal Science.
A green laser light illuminates a metasurface 100 times thinner than paper, made at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnology. CINT is a collaboration between Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
Courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories.
Scientists from the Sandia National Laboratories and the Max Planck Institute for Light Science have reported a device (Through the quantum mirror) that can replace a room full of equipment to trap photons in a strange effect called entanglement. This device – a type of nano-engineered material called a metasurface – opens the door to the application of photons in a complex way that is not possible using compact technology.
When physicists say that photons are entangled, they mean that they are connected in such a way that individual actions affect each other, regardless of the location and distance of the photons in space. machine. It is an effect of quantum mechanics, the laws of physics that govern particles and other small matter.
Although this action (Through the quantum mirror) may seem strange, scientists have used it in new ways to process information. For example, interventions that help protect sensitive information and correct errors in quantum computing, areas that could one day have major implications for national security, science and finance. The tangle also enables new advanced encryption methods for secure communications.
Research was done for a revolutionary (Through the quantum mirror) device, which is a hundred times more than a piece of paper, in part, at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, the Department of Energy Office of Science, the Sandia National Laboratories working in Los Alamos. . Sandia’s team received funding from the Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences program.
Light goes in, entangled photons go out
The new metasurface acts as a gateway to this unusual quantum phenomenon. Somehow, it looks like a mirror “by trying to-cup” of Lewis Carroll, of young people Alice makes the world a new world.
Sandia National Laboratories senior scientist Igal Brener, an expert in nonlinear optics, led a team that helped demonstrate a device that is paving the way for powerful, compact quantum information processing technologies.
Courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories.
Instead of examining their new device, scientists are passing a laser through it. A beam of light passes through a tiny glass sample made of nanoscale structures of a common semiconductor material called gallium arsenide.
“It makes the whole lens look,” said Sandia lead scientist Igal Brener, an expert in the field of nonlinear optics who led the Sandia team. Sometimes, he says, a pair of photons entangled at different wavelengths exits the sample in the same direction as the incoming laser beam.
Brener says he’s excited about the device because it’s designed to create a series of photos that are joined together — not just one pair at a time, but multiple pairs joined together, and some that may be indistinguishable from one another. each other. Some technologies require these complex types called multiple connections for sophisticated information processing schemes.
Other smaller technologies based on silicon photonics can also incorporate photons, but without the necessary level of complexity. Until now, the only way to create such results is through many tables filled with lasers, special crystals, and other optical devices.
“It’s complicated and impossible when most of this tangle requires more than two or three paths,” Brener said. “These offline metasurfaces perform this task in a single view when previously this would have required complex optical processing.”
The scientific paper explains how the team successfully rearranged its metasurface to create entangled photons with different wavelengths, an important precursor to simultaneously creating multiple pairs of entangled photons. together.
However, the researchers write in their paper that the performance of their device – the speed at which they can produce a complex photon – is lower than other methods and requires improvement.
What is Metasurface?
The metasurface is something that is used by synthetic and the electromagnetic waves in what he completed. Commercial companies, Brener said, are actively developing metasurfaces because they take up less space and can use more energy, for example.
“Now you can replace my eyes with great optics and metasurfaces,” Brener said. “These types of metasurfaces will revolutionize consumer products.”
Sandia is one of the world’s leading companies researching metasurfaces and metamaterials. Between it Microsystems Engineering, Science and Applications complex, which produces compound semiconductors, and the Center for Integrated Nanotechnology nearby, researchers have access to the special equipment they need to design, create and analyze these new high-quality materials.
Sylvain Gennaro, a former postdoctoral researcher at Sandia, said, “This work is difficult because it requires precise nanofabrication technology to achieve sharp optical distortion, which initiates the quantum process.”
The device was designed, built and tested through collaboration between Sandia and a research team led by physicist Maria Chekhova, an expert in quantum photon entanglement detectors at the Max Planck Institute for Light Science.
“Metasurfaces are leading to a paradigm shift in quantum optics, combining ultra small sources of quantum light and expanding the possibilities for quantum state engineering,” Max team member Tomás Santiago-Cruz said. Plank is the first author of the article.
Brener, who has studied metamaterials for more than a decade, said that this new research could eventually trigger a second revolution – one that sees these inventions not only as a new form of space, but as a technology for the treatment of quantum information and others. new application.
“There have been waves with well-placed metasurfaces in the way. There may be a second wave of innovative apps coming,” he said.
