The basic unit of information on a digital device is 0 or 1. A new kind of computer based on the use of qubits, which can be 0 and 1 at the same time, is being developed by scientists worldwide.
A team led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, in close collaboration with the Florida A&M College of Engineering, has announced the creation of a new qubit platform that shows great. Nature publishes their work.
There is still work to be done to make quantum computers reality, but we think we have a breakthrough with this research.
The team created its qubit by freezing neon gas into a solid at very low temperatures, spraying electrons from a light bulb onto the solid and trapping a single electron there.
The team chose the simplest type of qubit, a single electron. You can easily shoot out a lot of electrons by heating up a light bulb.
One important quality for qubits is their ability to remain in a single state for a long time, known as coherence time. The coherence time can be reduced by defects in the qubit system.
The team decided to trap an electron on a solid neon surface in a vacuum. Neon is one of only six elements that do not react with other elements.
The principal investigator of the project said that solid neon can serve as the cleanest possible solid in a vacuum to host and protect any qubits from being disrupted.
The team was able to manipulate the trapped electrons, allowing them to read and store information from the qubit, thus making it useful for use in future quantum computers.
Liquid helium was used in previous research to hold electrons. It was easy to make a material that was free of defects, but it was not so easy to make a material that was good for the qubit.
Solid neon is a material with few defects that does not vibrate like liquid helium. After building their platform, the team performed real-time qubit operations using microwave photons on a trapped electron. Solid neon provided a robust environment for the electron with very low electric noise. The qubit achieved coherence times in the quantum state that were competitive with other state-of-the-art qubits.
Jin said that the qubit platform should lend itself to simple, low-cost manufacturing.
The promise of quantum computing is that it can calculate problems much faster than classical computers. Researchers want to combine long coherence times with the ability of multiple qubits to link together. It would take a classical computer many years to resolve problems that a quantum computer could find.
There is a problem where researchers want to find the lowest energy configuration of a protein. No computer has the memory to handle trillions of folds of these amino acids. With quantum computing, one can use entangled qubits to create a superposition of all folding configurations, providing the ability to check all possible answers at the same time and solve the problem more efficiently.
Researchers would just need to do one calculation, instead of trying trillions of possible configurations.
More information: Dafei Jin, Single electrons on solid neon as a solid-state qubit platform, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04539-x. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04539-x Journal information: Nature Citation: Building a better quantum bit: New qubit breakthrough could transform quantum computing (2022, May 4) retrieved 4 May 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-05-quantum-bit-qubit-breakthrough.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
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