Quantum Metasurfaces Manipulate Free Photons

A team at Los Alamos National Laboratory proposes that modulated quantum metasurfaces can control all properties of photonic qubits. According to the team, such a breakthrough would affect the fields of quantum information, communications, sensing, imaging, and energy and momentum harvesting. “People have studied classical metasurfaces for a long time,” said Diego Dalvit of the Physics of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems group in the laboratory’s Theoretical Division. “But we came up with this new idea, which was to modulate in time and space the optical properties of a quantum metasurface that allow us to manipulate, on demand, all degrees of freedom of a single photon.” A metasurface with...