MIT researchers developed a photon-shuttling “interconnect” that can facilitate remote entanglement, a key step toward a practical quantum computer.

Neural networks are one typical structure on which artificial intelligence can be based. The term ›neural‹ describes their learning ability, which to some extent mimics the functioning of neurons in our brains. To be able to work, several key ingredients are required: one of them is an activation function which introduces nonlinearity into the structure. A photonic activation function has important advantages for the implementation of optical neural networks based on light propagation. Researchers in the Stiller Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) and Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) in collaboration with Dirk Englund at MIT have now experimentally shown an all-optically controlled activation function based on traveling sound waves. It is suitable for a wide range of optical neural network approaches and allows operation in the so-called synthetic frequency dimension.

In the Quantum Mixtures Lab of the National Institute of Optics (Cnr-Ino), a team of researchers from Cnr, the University of Florence and the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy (LENS) observed the phenomenon of capillary instability in an unconventional liquid: an ultradilute quantum gas. This result has important implications for the understanding and manipulation of new forms of matter. The research, published in Physical Review Letters, also involved researchers from the Universities of Bologna, Padua, and the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

Lightmatter has announced Passage M1000, a groundbreaking 3D Photonic Superchip designed for next-generation XPUs and switches. The Passage M1000 enables a record-breaking 114 Tbps total optical bandwidth for the most demanding AI infrastructure applications.

In a groundbreaking advance that could accelerate the development of quantum technologies, researchers at the USC Viterbi Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and School of Advanced Computing have demonstrated the first optical filter capable of isolating and preserving quantum entanglement—a mysterious but powerful phenomenon at the heart of quantum computing, communication, and sensing. This work, published in Science, opens the door to compact, high-performance entanglement systems that can be integrated into quantum photonic circuits, enabling more reliable quantum computing architectures and communication networks.

Now, applied physicists at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have invented a new type of interferometer that allows precise control of light’s frequency, intensity and mode in one compact package.

Scientists at EPFL and IBM Research have developed a compact optical amplifier based on a photonic chip that vastly outperforms traditional optical amplifiers in both bandwidth and efficiency. This breakthrough could reshape data center interconnects, AI accelerators, and high-performance computing.

Xanadu, a leader in photonic quantum computing, has published a research article in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters, demonstrating how photonic qubits can be used to enact any quantum error correction (QEC) code—including codes that use a lot less qubits to suppress errors. This work opens the door to reducing the number of physical qubits needed for early fault-tolerant quantum computation, while preserving an error correction threshold comparable to other performant QEC codes. The flexibility and feasibility of Xanadu's photonic approach is highlighted, especially when considering the finite qubit resources that will be available in early utility-scale quantum computers.

UC Santa Barbara researchers are working to move cold atom quantum experiments and applications from the laboratory tabletop to chip-based systems, opening new possibilities for sensing, precision timekeeping, quantum computing and fundamental science measurements.

Researchers at the University of Twente solved a long-standing problem: trapping optically-generated sound waves in a standard silicon photonic chip. This discovery, published as a Featured Article in APL Photonics, opens new possibilities for radio technology, quantum communication, and optical computing.