This image shows inside the laboratories at ANFF, where the researchers designed and built the world’s first two-qubit logic gate. Credit: UNSW
Quantum logic gate in silicon built for the for the first time, making calculations between 2 qubits of information possible – and thereby clearing the final hurdle to making silicon quantum computers a reality. “What we have is a game changer,” said Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW. “Because we use essentially the same device technology as existing computer chips, we believe it will be much easier to manufacture a full-scale processor chip than for any of the leading designs, which rely on more exotic technologies.”
In classical computers, data is rendered as binary bits, which are always in one of two states: 0 or 1. However, a quantum bit (or ‘qubit’) can exist in both of these states at once, a condition known as a superposition. A qubit operation exploits this quantum weirdness by allowing many computations to be performed in parallel (a 2-qubit system performs the operation on 4 values, a three-qubit system on 8, and so on).
“If quantum computers are to become a reality, the ability to conduct 1- and 2-qubit calculations are essential,” said Dzurak. Until now, it had not been possible to make 2 quantum bits ‘talk’ to each other.
A key advantage of the UNSW approach is they reconfigured the ‘transistors’ that are used to define the bits in existing silicon chips, and turned them into qubits. “The silicon chip in your smartphone or tablet already has around one billion transistors on it, with each transistor less than 100 billionths of a metre in size,” said Dr Menno Veldhorst. “We’ve morphed those silicon transistors into quantum bits by ensuring that each has only one electron associated with it. We then store the binary code of 0 or 1 on the ‘spin’ of the electron, which is associated with the electron’s tiny magnetic field,” he added.
Dzurak noted that that the team had recently “patented a design for a full-scale quantum computer chip that would allow for millions of our qubits, all doing the types of calculations that we’ve just experimentally demonstrated.”
Such a full-scale quantum processor would have major applications in the finance, security and healthcare sectors, allowing the identification and development of new medicines by greatly accelerating the computer-aided design of pharmaceutical compounds (and minimizing lengthy trial and error testing); the development of new, lighter and stronger materials spanning consumer electronics to aircraft; and faster information searching through large databases. http://www.newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/crucial-hurdle-overcome-quantum-computing
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