NU QUANTUM
There are three kinds of light, says Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, the CEO and co-founder of Nu Quantum – a quantum photonics company based in Cambridge. Chaotic light is the stuff we encounter on a daily basis – street lamps and light bulbs. Coherent light covers things with structure, like lasers – which were first built in 1960, and have had a revolutionary impact on everything from surgery to home entertainment.
Palacios-Berraquero hopes that the third category, single-photon sources, could have an equally transformative effect. At Nu Quantum, she is working on technologies that can emit and detect single photons – the smallest possible units of light. “Photonic quantum technologies are about manipulating information – processing, communicating and securing information encoded in single particles of light,” she says. “That allows you to do different things – more powerful calculations, or better security.”