In the first phase, the laboratory infrastructure will be completed and tools suitable for studying the most important phenomena of quantum optics will be procured. Basic phenomena such as the particle and wave nature of photons, single-photon interference, Bell inequalities, random number generation, and basic quantum communication protocols will be studied experimentally.

In the second phase, the basic elements of a standard quantum optical laboratory (vibration-free optical tables, lasers, mirrors, photon sources, detectors, etc.) are procured with the associated high-frequency electrical devices that control the experiments and detectors. This makes it possible to realize some basic phenomena, such as two-photon interference or the coincidences of photon pairs and to study the entanglement experimentally. The second phase ends with the experimental implementation of degenerate optical parametric oscillators (OPO).

In the third phase, we plan to implement the first quantum informatics experiments. The OPO-based two-state systems developed in the second phase are used as qubits. We implement a four-qubit true quantum computer consisting of quantum coherently coupled OPOs that can determine the ground state of an Ising model of four spin variables (A. Marandi et al. Nature Photonics 2014). The experiment requires the treatment of pulses with extremely precise timing and delay (4 ns).

After the completion of the third phase, we will have optically produced quantum bits stable at room temperature, which can be manipulated by optical means and entangled states can be created. These building blocks can be concatenated in purely quantum, purely classical, or a combination of the two, and allow the study of quantum-classical hybrid systems.