Chip Can Project Video the Size of a Grain of Sand

By many estimates, quantum computers will need millions of qubits to realize their potential in applications in cybersecurity, drug development, and other industries. The problem is, anyone who has wanted to simultaneously control millions of a certain kind of qubits has run into the problem of trying to control millions of laser beams. That’s exactly the challenge scientists from MIT, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Sandia National Laboratories, and the MITRE Corporation were trying to overcome when they developed an image projection technology that they realized could also be the fix for a host of other challenges in augmented reality, biomedical imaging, and elsewhere. It comes in the form of a less-than-0.1-square-millimeter photonic chip capable of projecting the Mona Lisa onto an area smaller than the size of two human egg cells. “When we started, we certainly never would have anticipated that we would be making a technology that might revolutionize imaging,” says M