Previously, communication through the code of the electron spin has become a hot discussion for scientists. Because the success of spin control code that can make the emission of photons to be faster. To that end, Harvard University recently has managed to make devices that can capture light in a pillar of a small diamond embedded in silver, releasing a stream of single photons at controllable levels.
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| SEM image of the diamond nanoposts. Each one is approximately 100nm wide and 200nm tall. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. Image courtesy of Jennifer Choy, Harvard University. |
This progress is a milestone on the way to a quantum network where information can be encoded in the spin of electrons and carried over the network through a light, one photon at a time. Principal investigator of this device is Marko Loncar, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
The basis of this device is nanotechnology, because only with nanotechnology (currently) we can control the number of quantum events from a device. This device consists of several parallel rows of small, diamond post nanofabricated, embedded in a layer of silver, each of which can act as a source of single photons.
Interestingly, the quantum dynamics can be studied well on this device, simply by removing the silver wrapper of their nanostructure, the team was also able to achieve slow release of photons. A good step, researchers used a diamond lattice imperfections formations, which replace carbon atoms with other elements.
These devices contain negatively charged nitrogen vacancy center, which can absorb light energy and hold it for a certain amount of time, eventually releasing it in the form of photons. Solid-state quantum emitters, such as nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond, is a powerful system for the practical realization of various quantum information processing protocols and schemes of nano magnetometry at room temperature.
"One major challenge is the efficiency with which you can write information into the spin of the color centers, as well as the efficiency with which you can collect photons emitted from the color center," explains co-author Jennifer Choy, a graduate student in the lab Loncar at SEAS .
Source: Harvard University, Science Daily
External links:
- Know more about magnetometry from wikipedia
- Know more about quantum network from wikipedia
- Know more about diamond from wikipedia
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