A chip that can hold light still — a step toward quantum computers

Engineers at the University of Illinois have taught a computer chip to do something extraordinary: hold particles of light for over a millionth of a second. Professor Elizabeth Goldschmidt's team built the light-memory on thin-film lithium niobate, a material that can be manufactured at scale — a first for this kind of platform. Quantum computers need to briefly 'hold' light-based information the way ordinary computers hold data in memory; this is a concrete step toward machines that could one day design new medicines and materials. The work was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nano Letters.