Research Highlight

Weaving Quantum Processors Out of Laser Light

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.

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.

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