A joint research group led by Professor Akira Furusawa has succeeded in generating optical quantum states with strong quantum nature, known as Schrodinger’s cat states, at a rate 1000 times faster than previously possible. The joint research achievement by Professor Furusawa’s team, the University of Massachusetts, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and RIKEN, replaces conventional quantum light sources and homodyne measuring devices for generating and measuring states with an optical parametric amplifier (OPA), which was developed primarily by NTT and a superconducting photon detector jointly developed by the University of Tokyo and NICT, significantly improving the frequency bandwidth of the light source and measurements. This has enabled the realization of Schrodinger’s cat state at a generation rate of megahertz, and if this is further developed, it is expected that a generation rate of gigahertz can be achieved, and a practical level of logical qubit generation rate is also expected to be achieved. The resulting paper was published in Nature Communications on 1 November.
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