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Scientific breakthrough a step toward quantum computing
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Light is the solution. It's also the problem. That's the paradox HP Labs' Quantum Information Processing Group is beginning to unravel with its research into optical quantum computing.
Their starting point was solving yet another puzzle: how to detect photons, or individual chunks of light, without absorbing or damaging them. Typically, detecting a single photon requires letting it "smack into" something, such as a piece of semiconductor material, Spiller says. "That creates a lot of electrons and holes, and the piece of light is lost. So you can detect it, but in the process of doing so, it's destroyed."
Now the team has developed a method for both detecting photons without appearing to harm them and for allowing the bits of light to communicate with each other by having the photons 'talk' with one another via a probe light signal. The photon leaves an imprint of itself on the probe light signal without being damaged in the process, allowing the researchers to detect it without
apparently demolishing it.
physorg.com
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