New metalens lights the way for advanced control of quantum emission

Phys.org  August 8, 2023 Traditional control of emission from quantum light sources relies on the use of multiple bulky optical elements or nanostructured resonators with limited functionalities, constraining the potential of multi-dimensional tailoring. An international team of researchers (Australia, South Korea) designed an ultrathin polarisation-beam-splitting metalens for the arbitrary structuring of quantum emission at room temperature. Due to the complete and independent polarisation and phase control at the single meta-atom level, the metalens enabled simultaneous mapping of quantum emission from ultra-bright defects in hexagonal boron nitride and imprinting of an arbitrary wavefront onto orthogonal polarisation states of the sources. The […]

‘Edge of chaos’ opens pathway to artificial intelligence discoveries

Phys.org  June 29, 2021 An international team of researchers (Australia, Japan) discovered that on the neuromorphic dynamics of nanowire networks (NWNs), a unique brain-inspired system with synapse-like memristive junctions embedded within a recurrent neural network-like structure. Through simulation and experiment they elucidated how collective memristive switching gives rise to long-range transport pathways, drastically altering the network’s global state via a discontinuous phase transition. The spatio-temporal properties of switching dynamics are found to be consistent with avalanches displaying power-law size and life-time distributions, with exponents obeying the crackling noise relationship, thus satisfying criteria for criticality, as observed in cortical neuronal cultures. […]

Pearls may provide new information processing options for biomedical, military innovations

Science Daily  November 13, 2020 To overcome the hardware limitations of conventional spectrometers and hyperspectral imagers a team of researchers in the US (Purdue University, AFRL) has developed a spectral information processing scheme in which light transport through an Anderson-localized medium serves as an entropy source for compressive sampling directly in the frequency domain. As implied by the “lustrous” reflection originating from the exquisite multilayered nanostructures, a pearl (or mother-of-pearl) allows us to exploit the spatial and spectral intensity fluctuations originating from strong light localization for extracting salient spectral information with a compact and thin form factor. The research can […]

Optical wiring for large quantum computers

Phy.org  October 22, 2020 The fundamental qualities of individual trapped-ion qubits are promising for long-term systems, but the optics involved in their precise control are a barrier to scaling. Researchers in Switzerland used scalable optics co-fabricated with a surface-electrode ion trap to achieve high-fidelity multi-ion quantum logic gates, which are often the limiting elements in building up the precise, large-scale entanglement that is essential to quantum computation. Light is efficiently delivered to a trap chip in a cryogenic environment via direct fibre coupling on multiple channels, eliminating the need for beam alignment into vacuum systems and cryostats and lending robustness […]