A QuICS Fellow working to understand the quantum interactions of photons is featured in Terp, the university’s award-winning magazine sent to alumni, faculty and other university stakeholders.
Alexey Gorshkov, an adjunct assistant physics professor who’s also a research scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is developing a technique for creating a “molecule” out of two photons, or light particles, bound together at a specific distance.
Assisting Gorshkov on the project are QuICS postdoctoral researchers Michael Gullans and Mohammad Maghrebi.
“What we’re really trying to learn is how photons interact with each other,” Gorshkov says in the article. “Once we’ve learned how to make them interact, then we can build a quantum computer out of them.”
The research team says their findings could also improve fiber-optic telecommunications. Currently, information is transmitted by photons, but must be converted to electrical energy for processing. But with photons able to strongly and predictably interact, electricity may no longer be necessary.
Go here to read the full article.