Sparrow Quantum Sets Record With 500 Million Usable Photons Per Second

Insider Brief

• Sparrow Quantum and Ruhr University Bochum developed a deterministic source that delivers more than 500 million usable photons per second into optical fiber.
• The source operates at 1 gigahertz with more than 50% fiber efficiency while maintaining high photon purity and indistinguishability without spectral filtering.
• The increased photon supply could enable experiments involving 10 to 20 photons and support applications in quantum computing, networking, communications and metrology.

PRESS RELEASE — Quantum computers are being built in several ways: superconducting circuits, trapped ions, neutral atoms, semiconductor spins and photonics. Photonic quantum systems have one fundamental advantage: their information carriers can travel through optical fibre, making the same technology relevant to both quantum processors and quantum networks.

What photonic quantum systems need in exchange is a supply of photons that behaves: each one identical to the last, each arriving when the machine asks rather than when physics happens to oblige. For much of the field’s history, that has meant probabilistic sources: excite a material, wait for the photon-generation event to occur, and discard the occasions when it does not.