Optical Quantum Processor Scales to Extreme

A prototype of a large-scale quantum processor made of laser light has been created by a team from Australia, Japan, and the U.S. The processor has built-in scalability that allows the number of quantum components to scale to extreme numbers. “Our approach starts with extreme scalability, built in from the very beginning, because the processor, called a cluster state, is made out of light,” said Nicolas Menicucci, chief investigator at the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) at RMIT University. The entanglement structure of a large-scale quantum processor made of light. Courtesy of Shota Yokoyama 2019. A cluster state is a large collection of entangled quantum components — a key...