Communications of the ACM
The World's First Photonic Router
Scientists at the Weizman Institute in Israel have demonstrated the world's first photonic router.
Credit: Barak Dayan
A team of scientists from the Weizman Institute in Israel have demonstrated the world's first photonic router in a step toward overcoming the difficulties in building quantum computers.
The photonic router was build by a team led by Barak Dayan, head of the institute's Quantum Optics group.
At the heart of the router is an atom that can switch between two states, enabling it to redirect photons fired at it through an optical cable. Dayan says the device acts as the photonic equivalent of an electronic transistor.
The breakthrough was made possible through the combination of two state-of-the-art technologies: the laser-cooling and trapping of atoms, and the fabrication of chip-based, ultra-high-quality miniature optical resonators.
Dayan says the new photonic router will be applicable to future breakthroughs in the design of quantum computers meant to take advantage of the quantum phenomenon of superposition, in which particles can exist in many states at once. Dayan's team plans to continue working in this direction by developing new photonic devices such as quantum memory and logic gates.
From Weizman Wonder Wander
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