International team to demonstrate first heralded single-photon generation from a silicon chip

An international consortium of researchers has overcome an important barrier to the generation of single photons using a tiny, chip-scale device constructed from the most widely used material underpinning modern electronics: silicon. Their findings could hasten the advent of devices for quantum communication, ultra-low-power computing and other technologies now that all three basic components (sources, controllable circuits and detectors) of a quantum transceiver have been demonstrated using silicon photonics.