Quantum technologies with hybrid systems

Understand

An extensively pursued current direction of research in physics aims at the development of practical technologies that exploit the effects of quantum mechanics.

• As part of this ongoing effort, devices for information processing, secure communication and high-precision sensing are being implemented with diverse systems, ranging from photons, atoms and spins to mesoscopic superconducting and nanomechanical structures.
• Their physical properties make some of these systems better suited than others for specific tasks; thus, photons are well suited for transmitting quantum information, weakly interacting spins can serve as long-lived quantum memories, and superconducting elements can rapidly process information encoded in their quantum states.
• A central goal of the envisaged quantum technologies is to develop devices that can simultaneously perform several of these tasks, namely, reliably store, process, and transmit quantum information.