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Writer's picturemansour ansari

Semiconductor quantum transistor architecture - 1st single photon transistor switch

Photon to photon connectivity as qubits. Very challenging, but there is plenty of good news.


The lack of deterministic photon-photon interactions is a challenge for quantum computation in this approach. Currently, the biggest challenge with this approach is lack of deterministic photon-photon interaction. It means it is hard to do gates. But, there is good news.


To deterministically control an optical signal with a single photon requires strong interactions with quantum memory. Nanophotonic structures coupled to quantum emitters may offer an attractive approach to realize single-photon nonlinearities in a compact solid-state device. "

There has been some successful research conducted at the University of Maryland and the Joint Quantum institute in controlling photons with solid-state qubits - the first single-photon switch and transistor enabled by solid-state quantum memory using a semiconductor chip.


It is alike a photon switch board, the device allows one photon to switch other photons, and hence to produce strong and controlled photon-photon interactions.

A nanophotonic cavity coupled to a spin qubit combined together, form a semiconductor membrane with quantum dots. Together they sit in the middle of the array.


The array forms a photonic crystal, which uses the Bragg reflection mechanism (gives the angles for coherent scattering of waves from a crystal lattice) where light bounces around a trap. Next is quantum dots store the information about the photon with a single electron, which has the spin properties. Therefore using this switch or transistor, we can build and do gates for computation.

A scalable device suitable for quantum information processing will require higher efficiencies, as photon loss constitutes a dominant error source for photonic qubits.

Download another source of information on photon loss here:


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