The world’s shortest light pulse containing just one photon has been produced by Oxford University scientists.

The record for the most amount of information sent by a single photon has been broken by researchers at the University of Illinois. Using the direction of “wiggling” and “twisting” of a pair of hyper-entangled photons, they have beaten a fundamental limit on the channel capacity for dense coding with linear optics.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Joint Quantum Institute (NIST/University of Maryland) have developed a new method for creating pairs of entangled photons, particles of light whose properties are interlinked in a very unusual way dictated by the rules of quantum physics. The researchers used the photons to test fundamental concepts in quantum theory.

In a significant breakthrough, researchers at Northwestern University’s Center for Quantum Devices (CQD) have demonstrated visible-blind avalanche photodiodes (APDs) capable of detecting single photons in the ultraviolet region (360-200 nm).

Scientist from the Niels Bohr Institute at University of Copenhagen and from Harvard University have worked out a new theory which describe how the necessary transistors for the quantum computers of the future may be created. The research has just been published in the scientific journal Nature Physics.

Layer-by-layer light microscopic nanoscale images of cells and without having to prepare thin sections? A team led by Stefan Hell and Mariano Bossi at the Max Planck Intstitute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen is now leading the way with a technique called optical 3D far-field microscopy—with nanoscale resolution, good signal-to-noise ratio, and relatively short exposure times.

In a classic physics experiment, photons (light particles), electrons, or any other quantum particles are fired, one at a time, at a sheet with two slits cut in it that sits in front of a recording plate.

For a variety of applications in physics and technology, ranging from quantum information theory to telecommunications, it's handy to have access to pairs of photons created simultaneously, with a chosen energy.