There's a huge effort around the world to
develop quantum computers.
But these computers are not going to reach
their full potential until they're networked.
Because today's computers, they didn't reach
their full potential, until we had the internet.
When we started doing this, we really weren't
expecting this to work as well as it did.
It was exciting!
A versatile telecom quantum memory is one
of the basic building blocks of a quantum
network.
What we've done is to develop a technique
where we can use an erbium-doped material
as a quantum memory.
Erbium is one of the rare earth elements;
they're some of the heaviest elements on the
periodic table and they're not actually that
rare.
You'll find them in a lot of objects around
you, like fluorescent lights or old TV sets.
We intend to use this material for sending
quantum information over really long distances.
We had the idea to do this quite a few years
ago and a lot of the feedback we got was that
it wouldn't work.
Now that we've tried it, it actually worked
a whole lot better than we thought it was
going to.
Coherence is an indication of how long you
can hold onto or store a quantum state.
Our platform has a coherence time of more
than one second.
This should allow us to send quantum information
over more than 1,000kms. And we think that
it's long enough to potentially send the information
around the entire globe.
In addition to building quantum memories,
we can now use these techniques to interface
with silicon and superconducting qubits, two
of the most promising types of quantum computers.
Our technology has the advantage that our
memories interface directly with the optical
fibre in the network that's currently in use.
Other approaches are a lot more complicated,
so they've been hard to implement in the real
world.
Erbium is special because it's the only element
that will absorb and emit light at the telecommunications
wavelength.
The great thing about this platform is that
we can use it to make quantum light sources,
the other major component we need to make
a quantum network.
I'm really excited about this result, because
it's going to allow us to build the basic
building blocks for the quantum internet.
