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IMAGE: Schematic of the optical microcavity with 2D semiconductor. The nonlinear optical response arises from the larger Bohr radii Rydberg excitons allowing to push the limit to few photon nonlinear limit. view more
Credit: Image credit: Rezlind Bushati
The ability to turn on and off a physical process with just one photon is a fundamental building block for quantum photonic technologies. Realizing this in a chip-scale architecture is important for scalability, which amplifies a breakthrough by City College of New York researchers led by physicist Vinod Menon. They ve demonstrated for the first time the use of Rydberg states in solid state materials (previously shown in cold atom gases) to enhance nonlinear optical interactions to unprecedented levels in solid state systems. This feat is a first step towards realizing chip-scale scalable single photon switches.
A new path toward sending and receiving information with single photons of light has been discovered by an international team of researchers led by the University of Michigan.
Their experiment demonstrated the possibility of using an effect known as nonlinearity to modify and detect extremely weak light signals, taking advantage of distinct changes to a quantum system to advance next generation computing.
Today, as silicon-electronics-based information technology becomes increasingly throttled by heating and energy consumption, nonlinear optics is under intense investigation as a potential solution. The quantum egg carton captures and releases photons, supporting excited quantum states while it possesses the extra energy. As the energy in the system rises, it takes a bigger jump in energy to get to that next excited state that s the nonlinearity.