Another Step In Quantum Computing: A Functional Interconnect

New submitter Gennerik writes: According to a recent article in the MIT Technology Review, a team of international physicists have been able to create a quantum computing interconnect. The interconnect, which is used to connect separate silicon photonic chips, has the important feature of preserving entanglement. This marks a vital step in creating quantum computers that don't have to work in isolation. According to the article, the trick that The trick that [University of Bristol Researcher Mark Thomson] and pals have perfected is to convert the path-entanglement into a different kind of entanglement, in this case involving polarization. They do this by allowing the path-entangled photons to interfere with newly created photons in a way that causes them to become polarized. This also entangles the newly created photons, which pass into the optical fiber and travel to the second silicon photonic chip.

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Big news also in boson sampling

[JoshuaZ]

In related news on quantum computing 6-photon boson sampling has also been performed (incidentally also by researchers at Bristol with some overap between the two groups). See http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2435 for details and discussion. Boson sampling is an important idea which involves estimating the probability distribution of non-intersecting photons. Crucially, boson sampling may be substantially easier to construct since they don't require nearly as much in the way of complicated machinery and error correction as full-power quantum computers, but there are also strong reasons to believe that boson sampling cannot be done efficiently on a conventional computer. That paper is http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.01182 (which also has some other very cool results - they've made essentially reconfigurable chips for this rather than having to make new ones for any specific photon sampling procedure). The original paper which proposed boson sampling is http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/optics.pdf.