A team at the University of Calgary and Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, has discovered a method to use contaminants in diamonds to develop a node in a quantum network. The discovery could also enable sensitive magnetic field measurements and develop platforms applicable in biology.
Dr. Paul Barclay at the University of Calgary says contaminants in diamonds have been recently utilized to store data encoded on their quantum state, which can be monitored and read using light. He has worked with Dr. Andrei Faraon, Dr. Kai-Mei Fu, Dr. Charles Santori and Dr. Ray Beausoleil from Hewlett Packard to release a paper on their research in the journal Nature Photonics. Diamond impurities change the material's color slightly with a red or a yellow tint. The NV center impurity comprising a nitrogen atom and a vacancy in the diamond carbon lattice has quantum properties.
Single light particles, photons, could transfer this quantum data between impurities, each a node in a quantum network for power efficient data processing. The nano-size of the impurities and the complexity accompanying research and monitoring of multiple nanoscale quantum systems simultaneously is difficult.
Barclay, a professor in the Department on Physics and Astronomy at the University of Calgary, and researchers at HP, have developed photonic microring resonators on diamond chips. The microrings can efficiently direct light between diamond impurities and an on-chip photonic circuit attached to quantum impurities at other sites on the chip. They will in further research connect the microring to other parts on the diamond chip, and channel light between impurities.
The article, Resonant enhancement of the zero-phonon emission from a color centre in a diamond cavity, co-authored by Andrei Faraon, Kai-Mei Fu, Charles Santori and Ray Beausoleil (Hewlett Packard) and Paul Barclay (Hewlett Packard and University of Calgary), recently appeared in the on-line edition of Nature Photonics.
Source: http://www.ucalgary.ca