alt Hacker NewsI've worked in quantum nonlinear optics during my first postdoc 12 years ago, and back then we could only dream of the efficiency of frequency conversions that are used here. So many advances in just a decade, and most of them don't even make the news.
All those incremental changes is what made my research work indeed. As we described in the paper, the margin we had on amount of signal (dependent also on the conversion efficiency!) was small, so every % of loss anywhere in this chain of photon from emission to detection mattered.