E-Mail IMAGE: A metasurface with all-optical modulation of the refractive index induces color-spin-path quantum entanglement on a transmitted single photon. view more Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos, N.M., July 21, 2021--A team of scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory propose that modulated quantum metasurfaces can control all properties of photonic qubits, a breakthrough that could impact the fields of quantum information, communications, sensing and imaging, as well as energy and momentum harvesting. The results of their study were released yesterday in the journal Physical Review Letters, published by the American Physical Society. "People have studied classical metasurfaces for a long time," says Diego Dalvit, who works in the Condensed Matter and Complex Systems group at the Laboratory's Theoretical Division. "But we came up with this new idea, which was to modulate in time and space the optical properties of a quantum metasurface that allow us to manipulate, on-demand, all degrees of freedom of a single photon, which is the most elementary unit of light."