A photonic chip uses light instead of electricity and is being developed for the "production of ultra-fast quantum computers with capabilities far beyond today’s devices." The Financial Times stated that with the chip "data can be processed according to the counterintuitive rules of quantum physics that allow individual subatomic particle

Subatomic particle

In physics or chemistry, subatomic particles are the smaller particles composing nucleons and atoms. There are two types of subatomic particles: elementary particles, which are not made of other particles, and composite particles...

s to be in several places at the same time" and that: "Future quantum computers will, for example, be able to pull important information out of the biggest databases almost instantaneously."

See also

• Photonics
  Photonics
  The science of photonics includes the generation, emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, detection and sensing of light. The term photonics thereby emphasizes that photons are neither particles nor waves — they are different in that they have both particle...
  
  
• Silicon photonics
  Silicon photonics
  Silicon photonics is the study and application of photonic systems which use silicon as an optical medium. The silicon is usually patterned with sub-micrometre precision, into microphotonic components. These operate in the infrared, most commonly at the 1.55 micrometre wavelength used by most...
  
  
• Photonic integrated circuit
  Photonic integrated circuit
  A photonic integrated circuit or integrated optical circuit is a device that integrates multiple photonic functions and as such is analogous to an electronic integrated circuit...
  
  
• Optical switch
  Optical switch
  In telecommunication, an optical switch is a switch that enables signals in optical fibers or integrated optical circuits to be selectively switched from one circuit to another....
  
  
• Timeline of quantum computing
  Timeline of quantum computing
  -1970s:* 1970 – Stephen Wiesner invents conjugate coding.* 1973 – Alexander Holevo publishes a paper showing that n qubits cannot carry more than n classical bits of information . Charles H. Bennett shows that computation can be done reversibly.* 1975 – R. P...