Transistors are tiny switches that form the bedrock of modern computing; billions of them route electrical signals around inside a smartphone, for instance.
Quantum computers will need analogous hardware to manipulate quantum information. But the design constraints for this new technology are stringent, and today’s most advanced processors can’t be repurposed as quantum devices. That’s because quantum information carriers, dubbed qubits, have to follow different rules laid out by quantum physics.
Scientists can use many kinds of quantum particles as qubits, even the photons that make up light. Photons have added appeal because they can swiftly shuttle information over long distances, and they are compatible with fabricated chips. However, making a quantum transistor triggered by light has been challenging because it requires that the photons interact with each other, something that doesn’t ordinarily happen on its own.
Now, researchers at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering and Joint Quantum Institute (JQI)—led by Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, JQI Fellow, and Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics Affiliate Edo Waks—have cleared this hurdle and demonstrated the first single-photon transistor using a semiconductor chip. The device, described in the July 6 issue of Science, is compact; roughly one million of these new transistors could fit inside a single grain of salt. It is also fast and able to process 10 billion photonic qubits every second.
“Using our transistor, we should be able to perform quantum gates between photons,” says Waks. “Software running on a quantum computer would use a series of such operations to attain exponential speedup for certain computational problems.
The photonic chip is made from a semiconductor with numerous holes in it, making it appear much like a honeycomb. Light entering the chip bounces around and gets trapped by the hole pattern; a small crystal called a quantum dot sits inside the area where the light intensity is strongest. Analogous to conventional computer memory, the dot stores information about photons as they enter the device. The dot can effectively tap into that memory to mediate photon interactions—meaning that the actions of one photon affect others that later arrive at the chip.
Read more: Quantum transistor opens the door for photon-based computing
thumbnail courtesy of phys.org
