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EMRP-Projekt SIQUTE erfolgreich abgeschlossen

Categories:
  • Fundamentals of Metrology
07.03.2017

The SIQUTE (Single-photon sources for quantum technologies) project has made a significant contribution to the development and to the characterization of single-photons sources, which will be used in a large variety of applications. It has brought the understanding of the importance of these sources for future metrology into the national metrology institutes (NMIs) within Europe.

Single-photon sources have a large variety of applications in the field of metrology. Furthermore, deterministic, compact and efficient single-photon sources (SPS) are required for cutting edge quantum optical technologies such as quantum communication, quantum computation, quantum metrology and quantum radiometry. Until the beginning of this project, neither single-photon-sources nor metrology-based characterization of such sources existed that fulfilled the requirements needed for the above mentioned scientific and technological fields.

In order to solve the problem, tight collaboration and partnership between the European NMIs involved in the project and the leading research institutes and universities were established. This led to the synergy between the excellence in metrology and measurement technique of the NMIs on one side and the excellence in science and technology of the research institutes and universities on the other side. After completion of the project, single photon sources are established within the NMIs and are available for use in wider fields of metrology, i.e. quantum-based radiometry and specific fields of quantum metrology.

The early impacts of this project are the establishing of the single-photon metrology and single-photon based metrology into the European NMIs; the establishing of single-photon metrology within the relevant committee like CCPR and EURAMET TC-PR and the establishing of a European network of NMIs and collaborating research institutes and universities on the field of single-photon sources and single-photon metrology.

The longer-term impacts of this project are the implementation of single-photon sources into calibration services: the developed sources will be used as sources for the calibration of single-photon detectors, where nowadays one is limited to attenuated laser sources with different photon statistics; the implementation of the developed single-photon sources as standard sources: within the project it was shown, that single-photon sources can act like a standard “light” source, as e.g. the blackbody radiator or the synchrotron radiation; the use of the low optical flux detector, developed within this project, in different NMIs within Europe for the measurement of low optical fluxes and the enhancement of the measurement capabilities of the NMIs triggered by the pilot study on the detection efficiency, which started at the end of this project.

Details and reports of the project may be found on the project website (Opens external link in new windowhttp://www.ptb.de/emrp/siqute-home.html) and on the EURAMET project websites (Opens external link in new windowwww.euramet.org).

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