Silicon Quantum Photonics in the Short-Wave Infrared: A New Platform for Big Quantum Optics

Quantum photonic technology encodes information within single photons, and the entanglement between them. Quantum sensors accumulate information about their environment in single photons; quantum-secured communications distribute secret quantum key between parties on photons; and optical quantum computers wield huge entangled states of photons to arrive at their answers. For all these applications, photon loss is catastrophic.