Two teams of scientists have entangled light and matter inside a solid for the first time.

The teams both use holes inside the semiconductor material gallium arsenide to house a quantum dot. A laser pulse directed at the dot jolts it into spitting out a particle of light, which is entangled with both the quantum dot and the electric field of the cavity itself.

Trapping the entangled objects inside semiconductors means that physicists can easily hook them up to conventional circuits.