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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.
Summary would have read better if the submitter had read over it. ;)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Hey, its me, your boss (please, call me a thought leader for our synergy group.) Ive recently been made aware of our tubes, and im concerned to find out we arent keeping abreast of the latest technology in quantum...functional....photon quantum...inter...
...Listen. Im told we need to get our functional quantum polarity to be a photon. I read this on a technical article and --as I understand this -- none of our current infrastructure supports paths. Ive looked at my desktop several times today and cant find the icon for quantum entangler danglers or the polar photons. Ive put a ticket in to entangle the photons I ordered (they should arrive sometime friday) so we can start computing quantums.
PS, if quantum photon tangler re-danglers are activated, let me know which light on the server indicates this and how i can check to make sure the tangler is launching fresh photons.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
No. That's not how entanglement works. A better way of thinking about entanglement is imagining two fair coins that can be any distance apart and the first time you flip them, you are guaranteed that they'll either both be heads or both be tails. This isn't a perfect description, but this is close enough. If one wants to be mathematically rigorous then we'd say that two particles are entangled if we cannot describe their combined state simply as the tensor product of the state of each one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement#Quantum_mechanical_framework. If you want to read a good introduction to a lot of these issues, I recommend Scott Aaronson's "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" which is essentially aimed as an introduction to quantum computing for non-experts with a some math background (essentially assumes is ok with basic linear algebra and basic calculus). Scott is an absolutely fantastic writer.