Metasurface Entangles and Distributes Photons

Metasurface Entangles and Distributes PhotonsPhotons passing through a specially engineered wafer emerge entangled and spread among multiple output channels. By Charles Day Before photon pairs can serve as conveyors of quantum information, they must be generated, entangled, and distributed.Each of those steps typically entails using at least one bulky, carefully aligned optical component.Mu Wang of Nanjing University in China and his collaborators have now shown that they can realize both entanglement and distribution with a single, passive metasurface [1].The feat, which relies on tailoring quantum interference, boosts prospects that photon-based quantum technologies could be miniaturized.