Van der Waals engineering, a technique historically used to tailor material properties by stacking two-dimensional materials, has been used in applications ranging from superconductivity to the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect. Now, scientists from Nanyang Technological University Singapore are taking this approach in a new direction. In a recently published study in Nature Photonics, the researchers demonstrate how ultra-thin materials can generate entangled photon pairs for quantum computing—potentially shrinking key components by 1,000 times. Led by Prof. Gao Weibo, the team at NTU developed a technique to create photon pairs using flakes of niobium oxide dichloride (NbOCl₂) that are just 1.2 micrometers thick. According to a recent post, that’s 80 times thinner than a strand of hair. Traditionally, bulky optical equipment has been needed to maintain photon entanglement, which makes integrating these systems into quantum chips challenging. But the NTU team’s method may bypass the need for the usual complex setup. As noted by the team, quantum computing with photons as qubits has unique advantages, such as the ability to operate at room temperature, as compared to electron-based qubits, which require ultra-low temperatures. Photons, when produced as entangled pairs, can hold quantum states that enable faster computations by performing multiple calculations at once. However, one of the biggest hurdles in using photons has been the difficulty in generating enough entangled photon pairs, especially with thinner materials.

Full research : Van der Waals Stacking Enables Entangled Photons, Potentially Shrinking Quantum Computing Components by 1,000 Times.