Achievement

EECS IGERT graduate student Matt Hall (advisor, Prem Kumar, EECS; co-advisor, Selim Shariar, EECS) joined an on-going project directed at bringing quantum information processing to the practical arena by combining it with the conventional fiber-optic communications infrastructure. This is not only interdisciplinary, but timely as well since a growing number of quantum-communication protocols require entanglement distribution among remote parties. Such distribution is best accomplished by exploiting the mature technology and extensive infrastructure of low-loss optical fiber. For this reason, a practical source of entangled photons must be drop-in compatible with optical fiber networks. We have demonstrated such a source for the first time, in which the nonlinearity of standard single-mode fiber is utilized to yield entangled photon pairs in the 1310-nm O-band.