12-04 :: April/May 2012

nanotimes News in Brief

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silicon chip. Heralded photons are the second in a pair of spontaneously-generated photons: when the first hits a detector and provides timing information, it ‘heralds’ the companion photon, which is then in a quantum mechanical single photon state.

The 0.5mm x 0.05mm-sized device reported in this research was fabricated using CMOS-compatible processes on 200mm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers at an external collaborative research foundry, and operates at room temperature, generating quantum light in the near-1550nm wavelength.

Drawing of NIST’s prototype bioreactor for tissue engi- neering. The bioreactor both stimulates and evaluates engineered tissue as it grows. Samples consisting of a mixture of cartilage cells and water-based gels (pink in the drawing) are placed in wells, and force is applied to the sample from above to mimic natural stimuli. Ultra- sound techniques monitor tissue changes over time. © Gallagher/NIST

“That is in the infrared range and it is technologically important because those wavelengths are used in today’s optical fiber networks,” said Shayan Mook- herjea, an associate professor of electrical and com- puter engineering at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. “Chip-scale single-photon sources could be used in quantum devices, networks and systems to bring about enormous improvements over their classical counterparts in terms of speed or security or computational complexity.”

Marcelo Davanco, Jun Rong Ong, Andrea Bahgat Shehata, Alberto Tosi, Imad Agha, Solomon Assefa, Fengnian Xia, William M. J. Green, Shayan Mookherjea, Kartik Sriniva- san: Telecommunications-band heralded single photons from a silicon nanophotonic chip, In: arXiv:1201.2659v1: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2659v1

Researchers at University of California, San Diego, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland and the Politec- nico di Milano (Milan, Italy), demonstrate heralded single photon generation in a CMOS-compatible silicon nanophotonic device. The researchers generated so-called heralded single photons from a