The research group of Prof. David Gershoni succeed in generating clusters of entangled photons, an ability essential for future quantum technologies.

In a recent breakthrough, Doctors Dan Cogan, Zu-En Su, and Oded Kenneth, and Professor David Gershoni have demonstrated a deterministic way to generate chains of entangled and identical photons clusters.

The group’s current study, published in Nature Photonics, presents a device that uses laser pulses to excite a single quantum dot. The device, also called “The Knitting Machine,” produces periodically 500 million single photons each second, where each photon in this continuous chain is entangled with the previous photon and the next one. The group has shown that every 10 consecutive photons in the chain are entangled.

The work presents the best source of entangled light demonstrated to date in terms of brightness, rate, and entanglement robustness. Equally important, the photons produced by the source are almost identical (indistinguishable). Identical photons can interfere constructively, thus providing a way to create entanglement connections between photons from different chains to scale up their cluster size and connectivity.
“We believe this breakthrough will advance the field of quantum information processing in general and quantum communication in particular. These fields will most likely form the basis of future quantum technologies. Our research motivation stems from our hope that technology will follow science and that soon, we will see wide use of genuine quantum technologies. In the near future, quantum information communication and entanglement distribution could become a feasible reality,” said Prof. Gershoni.

For the full article on the Technion website visit:
https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2023/02/let-there-be-entangled-light/

Read the full research paper here: nature.com/articles/s41566-022-01152-2

Credit: Technion Spokesperson