Quantum mechanics has gained a reputation for making counter-intuitive predictions. But we rarely get the chance to witness these effects directly because, being humans, we are simply too big. Take light, for example. The light sources that are familiar to us, such as those used in lighting and imaging or in CD and DVD players, are so huge that they emit billions and billions of photons. But what if there was a light source that emitted just one photon at a time?
Over the past few years, new types of light source that are able to emit photons one by one have been emerging from laboratories around the world. Pulses of light composed of a single photon correspond to power flows in the femtowatt range - a million billion times less than that of a table lamp. The driving force behind the development of these single-photon sources is a range of novel applications that take advantage of the quantum nature of light. Quantum states of superposed and entangled photons could lead the way to guaranteed-secure communication, to information processing with unprecedented speed and efficiency, and to new schemes for quantum teleportation.
Read this article in full in the February issue of Physics World