A colorful quirk of quantum optics could lead to significant advances in quantum communication and computing
Driving late at night, you come upon a red light and stop the car. You lift your hand wearily to block the red glow streaming through your windshield. Suddenly, both the green and yellow lights come on, hitting your eyeballs at the same time. Confused, you take your hand away, and again only the red color appears.
This experiment also paves the way for novel quantum information applications. When the brightest color is blocked, the photons that pop up simultaneously are entangled with each other, behaving in sync even when they are separated over large distances. This provides a new tool for quantum communication and information processing in which entangled photon pairs can serve as distributed keys in quantum cryptography or store information in a quantum memory device.
Regular interference occurs between two waves like ripples on a pond, overlapping in a pattern of crests and troughs. A distinctive feature of the quantum world is that interference occurs not only between actual waves but also between probabilities: a photon sent through two slits has some probability of going through the left slit and some probability of going through the right one. The two possible paths interfere with each other, forming a pattern of crests and troughs.
Schemmer and his colleagues saw the potential of recently developed technology to experimentally test this theory. First, they cooled a cloud of rubidium atoms to just shy of absolute zero. Then they used optical tweezers—a tightly focused laser beam strong enough to grab extremely tiny objects—to isolate and hold one atom.
A Practical Promise The atom’s “second task” of scattering photons in pairs could come in handy for quantum computing and communication. Once the brightest color is blocked, the pairs of photons that arrive simultaneously are entangled with each other—entanglement being the not-so-secret ingredient that gives quantum approaches advantages over classical ones.
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