Researchers at Edinburgh, Scotland's Heriot-Watt University have developed
a potent new method for programming optical circuits, which are essential
for the development of future technologies like superfast quantum computers
and unhackable communications networks.
Professor Mehul Malik of Heriot-Watt's School of Engineering and Physical
Sciences says, "Light can carry a lot of information, and optical circuits
that compute with light—instead of electricity—are seen as the next big leap
in computing technology." Malik is an experimental physicist.
However, the complexity and size of optical circuits make them more
difficult to manufacture and operate, which may have an impact on their
performance. Our work demonstrates a different—and more flexible—method of
creating optical circuits by utilizing a naturally occurring
mechanism."
The research was carried out by Professor Malik and his colleagues
utilizing commercial optical fibers, which are often used globally to
provide the internet to our homes and offices. These fibers use light to
transmit data; they are thinner than a human hair's thickness.
They discovered that they could precisely design optical circuits within an
optical fiber by taking use of the light's inherent scattering
characteristic.
Today, the study appears in the journal Nature Physics.
Professor Malik says, "Light gets scattered and mixed in complex ways when
it enters an optical fiber." "By learning this complex process and precisely
shaping the light that enters the optical fiber, we've found a way to
carefully engineer a circuit for light inside this disorder."
Future quantum technologies, which are created on a small scale by
interacting with individual atoms or photons, or particles of light, depend
heavily on optical circuits. These technologies include unhackable quantum
communications networks and potent quantum computers with enormous computing
capacity.
"Optical circuits are needed at the end of quantum communications networks,
for example, so the information can be measured after it's traveled long
distances," says Professor Malik. "They are also a key part of a quantum
computer, where they are used for performing complex calculations with
particles of light."
Large-scale advancements in fields like medication discovery, climate
prediction, and space exploration are anticipated to be made possible by
quantum computers. Optical circuits are also employed in machine learning,
or artificial intelligence, to handle enormous amounts of data
rapidly.
According to Professor Malik, light's multidimensionality is what gives it
strength.
"We can encode a lot of information on a single particle of light," he
said. Regarding its temporal organization, spatial structure, and color. And
a tremendous amount of processing power can be unlocked if you can compute
with all of those qualities simultaneously."
The researchers also demonstrated how quantum entanglement—the phenomenon
where two or more quantum particles, like light photons, stay linked even
when they are separated by enormous distances—can be controlled using their
programmable optical circuits. Many quantum technologies, including error
correction within a quantum computer and the most secure forms of quantum
encryption, depend on entanglement.
Together with academic partners from Lund University in Sweden, Sapienza
University of Rome in Italy, and the University of Twente in the
Netherlands, Professor Malik and his research team at the Beyond Binary
Quantum Information Lab at Heriot-Watt University undertook the study.
