Generating Photons for Communication in a Quantum Computing System

(MIT) MIT researchers using superconducting quantum bits connected to a microwave transmission line have shown how the qubits can generate on demand the photons, or particles of light, necessary for communication between quantum processors.
The advance is an important step toward achieving the interconnections that would allow a modular quantum computing system to perform operations at rates exponentially faster than classical computers can achieve.
“Modular quantum computing is one technique for reaching quantum computation at scale by sharing the workload over multiple processing nodes,” says Bharath Kannan, MIT graduate fellow and first author of a paper on this topic published today in Science Advances. “These nodes, however, are generally not co-located, so we need to be able to communicate quantum information between distant locations.”
“We did not yet perform the communication between processors in this work, but rather showed how we can generate photons that are useful for quantum communication and interconnection,” Kannan says.