Bloom Media, in partnership with CNRS Ingénierie, brought its cameras to C2N for a report that gets up close to quantum research. The film follows Pascale Senellart, CNRS research director at C2N and co-founder of Quandela, as she explains how single-photon sources, built from quantum dots, are paving the way for tomorrow’s quantum computers.
Photons emitted one by one
C2N researchers develop components for quantum technologies: rather than lasers, they use “grains of light”, photons emitted one at a time to encode information. These single photons are produced by quantum dots, tiny objects made up of a few thousand atoms embedded in semiconductor materials. Each dot is surrounded by a structure of stacked layers that acts as a cage of mirrors and guides the photons in the same direction, all operating at a temperature close to absolute zero.
From the optics lab to the cleanroom
The report takes you inside our optics laboratories, where component fabrication begins using the “In Situ” technology, invented at C2N almost twenty years ago. It continues in our cleanroom of nearly 3,000 m², one of the largest academic cleanrooms in France, where electron microscopy imaging makes it possible to check fabrication quality at the micrometer scale. The goal: to produce large numbers of strictly identical components that emit indistinguishable photons, an essential condition for entangling them and building a quantum computer.
From the lab to industry
C2N works with Quandela, which turns these laboratory technologies into an industrial product and has been developing a photonic quantum computer since 2020.
