Phys.org August 25, 2022
Optical photons represent ideal qubit carriers. However, the most successful technique so far for creating photonic entanglement is inherently probabilistic and, therefore, subject to severe scalability limitations. Researchers in Germany generated up to 14 entangled photons in a defined way and with high efficiency by using a single atom to emit the photons and interweave them in a very specific way, they placed a rubidium atom at the center of an optical cavity and triggered the emission of a photon that is entangled with the quantum state of the atom. By repeating the process several times rotating, the atom and creating a chain of up to 14 light particles that were entangled with each other by the atomic rotations and brought into a desired state. Because the chain of photons emerged from a single atom, it could be produced in a deterministic way, in principle, each control pulse delivers a photon with the desired properties. The method allows any number of entangled photons to be generated and the method is efficient. By measuring the photon chain produced they proved the efficiency to be almost 50%. According to the researchers their work offers a way towards scalable measurement-based quantum computation and communication…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Experimental setup and protocol. Credit: Nature volume 608, pages677–681Â