Professor Akira Furusawa and his team, in collaboration with Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), have succeeded in generating quantum entanglement at 60 GHz, more than 1000 times faster than conventional entanglement. The world’s first real-time generation and observation of quantum entanglement on a picosecond scale has opened up a new era of ultrafast optical quantum technology, leading to the realisation of a quantum computer with a clock speed of several tens of GHz, which surpasses conventional computers. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon unique to quantum mechanics with a special correlation between two or more qubits, and is a fundamental resource for a wide range of quantum technologies, including quantum computation, quantum communication and error correction, in which the generation speed is an important parameter. The optical parametric amplifier (OPA) jointly developed by the University of Tokyo and NTT has enabled the generation and real-time measurement of optical quantum entanglement at a world-leading speed of 60 GHz, making it possible to use quantum entanglement, the root of all quantum technology, in a form that is both fast and fully applicable to quantum information processing. The resulting paper was published in the online edition of Nature Photonics on 29 January.
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