Quantum physicists can now distil a kind of photon schnapps. When spirits are distilled, the alcohol content increases relative to the water content. A similar method developed by a team from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching works on light quanta – photons. It extracts individual photons from a light source, pushes back the unwanted vacuum component, and reports this event. Such single photons are important quantum bits for the currently emerging quantum information technology.
Severin Daiss, Stephan Welte, Bastian Hacker, Lin Li und Gerhard Rempe Single-Photon Destillation