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Are there interesting spinoff technologies that having an efficient entangled photon source would enable? My very spotty understanding makes me wonder if this c
by mistercow 9y ago
Are there interesting spinoff technologies that having an efficient entangled photon source would enable? My very spotty understanding makes me wonder if this could have an impact on quantum computing. It seems like an interesting question, since military funding is involved.
- krastanov 9y agoYes, so much so that I would not call it a spin-off, rather one of the main tasks that people building quantum computing hardware are dealing with. Entanglement is one of the main phenomena that permit quantum hardware to do things infeasible on classical hardware. In the context of communication it permits quantum key distribution, whose security depends only on quantum mechanics being a not-too-wrong description of nature (while classical schemes depend on less tested computational complexity conjectures). In the context of computing, it is an integral component of many of the "fault-tolerant error correcting" schemes, necessary in order to protect the extremely fragile qubits (similar to what ECC RAM does for classical computing). In the context of sensing, it does permit some cool unbelievably sensitive detectors (the case discussed in the article), but it is only one of the avenues of intense research.
- mistercow 9y agoDoes quantum computing require entanglement of more than two photons with each other? One of the reasons I could see this not actually advancing QC is if what's needed for quantum radar is easy generation of entangled pairs, while QC requires something more difficult.