Operating under EU funding, the QPHOTON project is looking to improve single-photon production due to the lack of usefulness of some current devices for generating, manipulating and detecting photons without background noise.
Johann Reithmaier, the coordinator of QPHOTON, says: "We set out to address this – to strongly improve the efficiency of producing single photons without any background of other photons."
The researchers add that the ultimate aim of their studies is to allow single photons to be used to carry data as a step towards quantum computing, which allows a bit of data to be stored by each photon.
Scientists involved in the project have backgrounds in quantum physics, nanotechnology and optoelectronics and are based in France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Israel.
