The development of quantum technologies has created various thrilling commercial possibilities in the communication and computing industries. However, the commercialization of quantum systems is not an easy task and it is quite challenging for quantum technologies to scale the quantum systems appropriately.
An effective customization and use of diffractive beam splitters can help extend optical quantum systems. There is a wide variety of diffractive beam splitter quantum utilizations, including tapping atoms by producing a collection of high-intensity spots and the concurrent excitation of collections of quantum dots.
Here, we will discuss the operating principles of diffractive beam splitters, some advantages of using diffractive beam splitters in quantum optics, and three useful applications of diffractive beam splitter quantum technologies.
The Operating Principle of Diffractive Beam Splitters
Diffractive beam splitters follow the operating principle of optical diffraction. These beam splitters are basically transmissive, flat, diffractive optical elements. They can effectively split an incident beam into several output beams with desired separation angles and power ratios.
Binary gratings are the most basic kind of diffractive beam splitters that split the laser beam into two major orders. Similarly, a 2-dimensional type of diffraction grating is a beam splitter matrix element that is useful for producing 2-dimensional collections of spots with uniform intensity and equal separations.
The periodic structure on the surface of these optical elements is what allows them to produce a phase delay. This phase profile results in the diffraction into several orders with a specific angle for each order.
The Challenges of Integrating Diffractive Beam Splitters into Quantum System Applications
One of the major challenges of integrating diffractive beam splitters is that often large arrays of relatively small spots are required, demanding high NA focus optics with a large field.
Happily, other integration considerations are much simpler, as diffractive beam splitters are insensitive to tolerances, including incident beam size and positioning. The following considerations are paramount in quantum systems integration:
- One should design the diffractive beam splitters to fit the focusing system and generate the correct separations
- Zero orders should be handled correctly by a high-efficiency multilevel design or deflection of the desired orders.
The Applications of Beam Splitter Quantum Systems
The laser quantum systems use diffractive beam splitters for several applications, such as
- The generation of optical tweezer arrays or an array of optical traps is a useful quantum application that involves diffractive beam splitters. Laser tweezers have significant use in keeping the isolated and extremely cold atoms or qubits in the right place in various laser-cooling-based quantum computing techniques.
- Another important quantum application of diffractive beam splitters is sampling or exciting certain fixed configurations of various dense-state qubits. It is possible to create pre-selected samples of various qubits by using a 2-dimensional diffractive beam splitter matrix without affecting other states in the qbit array.
- Lastly, planner Lightwave technologies are also prominent examples of quantum applications that involve the representation of qubits in faintly coupled modes. It is possible to couple some particular modes from a specific waveguide to another waveguide on a different clip by using diffractive beam splitters.
We have only mentioned three notable quantum applications of beam splitters. There are several other applications of beam splitter quantum technologies. More importantly, we can expect that this technology will create various new possibilities in the future.
