Photons are great in many ways for quantum computing (they are cheap to produce, easy to detect, they don’t need a vacuum or near-absolute-zero temperatures) and in fact they are one of the contenders for the ultimate quantum computing technology. In this work, Ming Kang and colleagues from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Tianjin Normal University have developed a way to control the state of a single-photon qubit by using a metasurface (a 2D arrangement of metamaterials, which have interesting dielectrical properties). By playing with the physical characteristics of the metasurface, they managed to implement any single-qubit transformation on a single photon, and they even explored a regime where one can perform 2-qubit interactions with a single photon. One of the advantages of this idea is that the active area of the metasurface, which is needed to carry out the transformations, can be very small and so this technique is well-suited for integrated optics.

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