Oak Ridge National Lab Researchers Demo New Level of Control Over Photons

(ScienceDaily) Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have demonstrated a new level of control over photons encoded with quantum information. The team’s experimental system allows them to manipulate the frequency of photons to bring about superposition, a state that enables quantum operations and computing.
Joseph Lukens, Brian Williams, Nicholas Peters, and Pavel Lougovski, research scientists with ORNL’s Quantum Information Science Group, performed distinct, independent operations simultaneously on two qubits encoded on photons of different frequencies, a key capability in linear optical quantum computing. “To realize universal quantum computing, you need to be able to do different operations on different qubits at the same time, and that’s what we’ve done here,” Lougovski said.