Potential New Avenues Demonstrated for Quantum Information Processing

A team of researchers from Austria, Canada, and Finland used the spatial structure of light to experimentally implement so-called high-dimensional quantum gates. In the ongoing transition from classical to quantum information science, one driving force will be the increasing ability of scientists to generate, manipulate, and measure groups of individual quantum systems in order to harness them as information carriers. The most common unit of quantum information is a two-valued bit (a qubit). The processing of qubits relies on a few fundamental operations called quantum gates. Photonic quantum information can be manipulated by the controlled transformation of the light’s spatial structure, which is made visible here by...