Georgetown physicists help demonstrate photon coalescence from distinct sources

Posted in News Story

The development of practical devices for quantum computation will likely require interconnecting different types of subcomponents. Single photons are a promising means for this interconnection, but photons from different components need to be made indistinguishable in order to be able to carry out the computations. In a recent publication in Physical Review Letters (Polyakov et al., PRL 107, 157402, 2011), a team of researchers from NIST and the Georgetown Physics Department (graduate student Natasha Borjemscaia and her advisor, Professor Ed Van Keuren) reported the first ever demonstration of the coalescence of single photons emitted by very different emitters, a quantum dot and a parametric down-conversion source. The results of this work could have significant application in the development of quantum computers. 

(http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.157402)