Sun-drenched summer vacations may yield pleasant memories, but physicists in Australia have harnessed the power of light to remember something else: quantum information.
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Researchers have coaxed laboratory crystals to capture and release information carried within a light pulse at the highest efficiency yet. The work, reported in the June 24 issue of Nature, could one day lead to new types of secure communications that take advantage of the weird properties of the quantum world.
“It’s quite an important step towards our dream of extending the distances over which we can do quantum communication,” says Wolfgang Tittel, a physicist at the University of Calgary in Canada who was not involved in the work.