Optical highways for light are at the heart of modern communications. But when it comes to guiding individual blips of light called photons, reliable transit is far less common. Now, a collaboration of researchers from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), led by JQI Fellows Mohammad Hafezi and Edo Waks, has created a photonic chip that both generates single photons, and steers them around. The device, described in Science, features a way for t...

Quantum computers promise speedy solutions to some difficult problems, but building large-scale, general-purpose quantum devices is a problem fraught with technical challenges. To date, many research groups have created small but functional quantum computers. By combining a handful of atoms, electrons or superconducting junctions, researchers now regularly demonstrate quantum effects and run simple quantum algorithms—small programs ded...

Builders of future superconducting quantum computers could learn a thing or two from semiconductors, according to a report in Nature Communications. By leveraging the good ideas of the natural world and the semiconductor community, researchers may be able to greatly simplify the operation of quantum devices built from superconductors. They call this a "semiconductor-inspired" approach and suggest that it can provide a useful guide to improving su...