If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.

In the previous episodes (check here), we explored how to precisely arrange and control individual atoms, including charged ones, and how tiny electrical circuits can be turned into quantum systems. Each approach gives us a different way to build qubits, the fundamental units of quantum computers.

But what if we didn’t use matter at all?

What if we built a quantum computer using only light?

Welcome to the world of photonic quantum computers.

At first, this idea sounds almost too simple.

Light is everywhere. It travels incredibly fast, passes through glass, and carries information across the internet. But can it really store and process quantum information?

The answer is yes.

In fact, a single particle of light—a photon—is naturally a quantum object (check the past episode: Fifty Shades of Light #10 ). It already behaves according to the rules we need: it can exist in superposition, it can be entangled, and it can carry quantum information over long distances.

Instead of engineering artificial atoms or circuits, we can use photons directly as qubits. This naturally raises the question: why choose light when platforms based on atoms, ions, or superconducting circuits already exist? The answer is that photonic quantum computers offer unique advantages, unmatched by other approaches, as we will explore.