Qubits made from electrons floating on top of liquid helium could one day power the next generation quantum computeraccording to a new study.
While the bits that power classical computers encode data as either a 0 or a 1, qubits can be a superposition of the two states, meaning they can occupy both states in parallel while processing calculations.Computers constructed in this way will one day be more powerful than The fastest supercomputer today — and promised change in areas ranging from drug discovery to combating climate change.
Qubits are typically formed by manipulating the spin states of electrons between spin-up and spin-down positions (representing 1 and 0).
Other particles used as qubits include trapped ions, photons, artificial or real atoms and quasiparticles, According to Microsoft, Most qubits achieve superposition by cooling superconducting metals (which contain particles) to absolute zero.
But in a study published Nov. 9 in the journal Applied Physics ReviewsScientists believe that this traditional method of building qubits is challenging. This is because the combination of electrons and solid crystals, including metals, creates impurities in the material. This means that the qubits are not uniform, which in turn makes the qubits more likely to fail during calculations.
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The scientists said in a report that these defects could lead to several problems, including “unpredictable electric potentials” and difficulty in producing “many uniform qubits.” statement. This also means that increasing the number of qubits in a quantum system will amplify the error rate.
This prompted scientists to come up with a blueprint for a new type of qubit that would theoretically not suffer from such errors. They believed that allowing the electrons to float in a vacuum above a pool of liquid helium would cause no drawbacks to the system. This means that future quantum computers will need far fewer qubits to achieve quantum supremacy (the ability of a quantum computer to surpass that of a classical computer) because you don’t need to account for high qubit failure rates.
“Solid-state crystals always have some defects, which means we can’t create a perfect environment for electrons,” said the paper’s lead author. Erika Kawakamiphysicists working at Japan’s RIKEN Quantum Computing Center said in a statement. “If we want to create a large number of unified qubits, that’s a problem. So it’s better to have qubits [a] vacuum.
Build on past research
This qubit approach is not new. In 1999, scientists A physical system is proposed The floating electrons form qubits in a vacuum not far from the surface of liquid helium.
But because quantum computing research is still in its early stages, this study only involves quantum gates—an important but fundamental component of quantum mathematical operations, consisting of a small number of qubits. quantum gate It is the basis of quantum circuits and is mainly used to create quantum algorithms.
Tremendous progress in quantum computing research over the past few years led Kawakami and her colleagues to extend previous research with a new theory in which hybrid qubits are formed from floating electrons in two different states. The “charge state” uses electric fields and can easily manipulate electrons over medium distances, while the “spin state” can be used to store data stably. Due to the interaction between these two states, data is transferred between these two properties.
They proposed a system that uses countless small ferromagnetic pillars to trap electrons on top of liquid helium, allowing more than 10 million qubits to fit into an area the size of a postage stamp. In the next phase of this research, the scientists hope to test their theory through practical experiments with prototypes.
“We proposed how to implement single-qubit and two-qubit gates using electrons on helium and estimated their fidelity,” Kawakami added. “We also specified how to scale up the number of qubits. This is New things.”
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