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Another quantum breakthrough tips up

by on15 February 2018


The quantum cat is out of the bag and in the box

Boffins from two teams now working with Intel have reported advances in a new quantum computing architecture, called spin qubits.

While we are still to see full-purpose quantum computers, this chip design is different from what is out there because it uses silicon and bog standard computer processes.

TU Delft’s Thomas Watson, who wrote the study said that their chip could use standard computer processes.

"The hope is that by doing things this way, we can potentially scale up to larger numbers needed to perform useful quantum computing."

So far the TU Delft team, called QuTech have successfully tested two "spin qubits".

These qubits involve the interaction of two confined electrons in a silicon chip. Each electron has a property called spin, which sort of turns it into a tiny magnet, with two states: "up" and "down."

The researchers control the electrons with actual cobalt magnets and microwave pulses. They measure the electron's spins by watching how nearby electric charges react to the trapped electrons' movements.

QuTech researchers, now working in partnership with Intel, were able to perform some quantum algorithms, including the well-known Grover search algorithm (basically, they could search through a list of four things).

Meanwhile a paper published today in Nature. a team of physicists led by Jason Petta at Princeton reported that they could pair photons, to corresponding electron spins. This just means that distant spin qubits might be able to talk to one another using photons, allowing for larger quantum computers.

There are some advantages to these systems. Present-day semiconductor technology can create these spin qubits, and they would be smaller than the superconducting chips used by IBM.

The drawbacks include the fact that it's very difficult to measure the spins of these qubits, and even more difficult to get them to interact.

Last modified on 15 February 2018
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