The company said this innovation facilitates the precise synchronization of photons, thereby creating a buffer that could be used to create quantum computers. Experiments have shown that the buffer can slow down the speed of pulsed photons to 1/60 of the speed of light in vacuum while faithfully preserving its quantum state. The device used for this demonstration was created by NTT Basic Research Laboratories fabricated by coupling nanocavities with a total length of 840 μm using a silicon photonic crystal.
The research was published in the UK science journal “Nature Communications”.