“We’ve managed to prevent light from moving in the forward and backward directions. We’d like to also constrain light from transverse action,” says André, who has worked with Lukin for over three years.
The interaction of individual light photons facilitates computation and is the basis for the notion of quantum computers.
“We’re going to try and make two pulses of light interact with each other,” André says.
Trapping light pulses would allow them to interact and alter one another’s states, according to André, “whereas with two pulses of light that are just flying freely, because they’re moving so fast, they effectively don’t have much time to interact with one another.”
The interaction of light pulses is “the building block of anything you would want to call computation,” André says.
—Staff writer Ella A. Hoffman can be reached at ehoffman@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Tina Wang can be reached at tinawang@fas.harvard.edu.