Professor Kazuhiko Hirakawa, Professor Yasuhiko Arakawa, Associate Professor Jinkwan Kwoen, and their colleagues have succeeded in electrically sensitive detection of a hybrid state that has both optical and particle properties, a hyper-coupled state of terahertz electromagnetic waves and electrons in a nanostructure. Using a nanostructure called a quantum point contact (QPC), they have established a technique to detect hybrid quantum states in a single optical cavity with high sensitivity as electrical signals, which is expected to lead to new applications in quantum information processing technology, such as transporting quantum information held by electrons to distant locations via terahertz electromagnetic waves. The paper was published in Nano Letters on November 1.
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