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Physicists have created a phase of matter that has never been seen before by shining a laser pulse sequence. The phase has benefits even though there is only one flow of time.
Information stored in the phase is much more protected against errors than is currently used in quantum computers. The information can exist without getting garbled for a long time, which is an important milestone for quantum computing.
The approach's use of an extra time dimension is a completely different way of thinking about phases of matter, according to the researcher who worked on the project. It's exciting to see the theory ideas come to fruition in experiments.
The experiments were carried out on a quantum computer by a team.
10 atomic ion of ytterbium are used in the quantum computer. Each ion is individually held and controlled by electric fields produced by an ion trap.
Scientists call each atomic ion a quantum bit. Quantum computers use the strangeness of quantum mechanics to store more information than traditional computers. A qubit can be a 0, a 1 or a combination of both. The way qubits interact with one another promises to allow quantum computers to tackle computational problems far beyond the reach of conventional computers.
The cat's fate is sealed by peeking in Schrdinger's box and interacting with a qubit. It doesn't need to be deliberate. Even if you keep all the atoms under tight control, they can lose their quantumness by talking to their environment, heating up or interacting with things that you didn't plan on doing. Experiments have a lot of sources of error that can degrade coherence after a few lasers.
Making qubits more robust is the challenge. Physicists can usesymmetries to hold up to change It looks the same when it rotates by 60 degrees. One way to add symmetry is to blast the atoms with lasers. They wondered if they could go further. They wanted to add two by using non-repeating lasers.
Considering "quasicrystals" is the best way to understand their approach. The structure of a crystal is similar to that of a honeycomb. The pattern of a quasicrystal never repeats. Penrose is an example of this. It's even more incomprehensible that quasicrystals are from higher dimensions projected into lower dimensions. The Penrose tiling is a projected slice of a 5-D lattice.
The creation of a quasicrystal in time rather than space was proposed by three people. The researchers created a regimen of quasi-periodic laser-pulses based on the sequence. The sum of the two previous parts is the basis of the sequence. This arrangement is similar to a quasicrystal. It's similar to a quasicrystal in that it's a 2D pattern with a single dimensions. The system gets a bonus symmetry from a missing extra time dimensions.
The benefits of the theory in real-world qubits remained to be seen.
The theory was tested using a quantum computer. They used the sequence based on the numbers to light up the computer's qubits. The researchers wanted to see the new phase of matter experience two time symmetries at the same time, so they focused on the qubits at either end of the lineup. The edge qubits stayed quantum for 1.5 seconds in the periodic test. The qubits stayed quantum for the entire time of the experiment. The extra time gave more protection.
There is a complicated evolution that cancels out all the errors that live on the edge with this sequence. The edge stays quantum-mechanically coherent a lot longer than you would think.
The findings show that the new phase of matter can act as long-term quantum information storage, but the researchers still need to integrate the phase with the Computational side of quantum computing. We need to find a way to hook it into the calculations. We're working on that problem.
More information: Philipp Dumitrescu, Dynamical topological phase realized in a trapped-ion quantum simulator, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04853-4. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04853-4 Journal information: Nature Provided by Simons Foundation
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