The microprocessor inside a computer is a single multipurpose chip that has revolutionized people's lives, allowing them to use one machine to surf the Web, check e-mails and keep track of finances.
Now, researchers from the University of Bristol in the UK and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Japan, have pulled off the same feat for light in the quantum world by developing an optical chip that can process photons in an infinite number of ways.
It's a major step forward in creating a quantum computer to solve problems, such as designing new drugs, superfast database searches and performing otherwise intractable mathematics that aren't possible for supercomputers.
The fully reprogrammable chip brings together a multitude of existing quantum experiments and can realize a plethora of future protocols that have not even been conceived yet, marking a new era of research for quantum scientists and engineers at the cutting edge of quantum technologies. The work is published in the journal Science on August 14, 2015.
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