A Leap Towards Quantum Computing With Ultra Pure Silicon
The quantum computer is a futuristic machine that could operate at speeds even more mind-blowing than the world's fastest super-computers. At the moment, they exist pretty much in physicists' concepts, and theoretical research.
Now researchers are proposing a new theory towards making quantum
computing a reality, through the unique properties of highly enriched and
highly purified silicon.
According to one of the scientists involved in the research, Mike Thewalt of Simon Fraser University, there are some basic quantum computers in existence, but nobody yet can build a truly practical one, or really knows how to.
Such computers will harness the powers of atoms and sub-atomic particles (ions, photons, electrons) to perform memory and processing tasks, thanks to unusual sub-atomic properties.
What Thewalt and colleagues at Oxford University and in Germany have found is that their special silicon allows processes to take place and be observed in a solid state that scientists used to think required a near-perfect vacuum. And, using this "28Silicon" they have extended to three minutes, from a matter of seconds, the time in which scientists can manipulate, observe and measure the processes.
"It's by far a record in solid-state systems," Thewalt says. "If you'd asked people a few years ago if this was possible, they'd have said no. It opens new ways of using solid-state semiconductors such as silicon as a base for quantum computing.You can start to do things that people thought you could only do in a vacuum. What we have found, and what wasn't anticipated, are the sharp spectral lines (optical qualities) in the 28Silicon we have been testing. It's so pure, and so perfect. There's no other material like it."
But the world is still a long way from practical quantum computers, he notes.
Quantum computing is a concept that challenges everything we know or understand about today's computers.
Your desktop or laptop computer processes "bits" of information. The bit is a fundamental unit of information, seen by your computer has having a value of either "1" or "0". For example, the last paragraph, when written in Word, contains 181 characters including spaces. In your home computer, that simple paragraph is processed as a string of some 1,448 "1"s and "0"s.
But in the quantum computer, the "quantum bit" (also known as a "qubit") can be both a "1" and a "0" =and all values between 0 and 1"”at the same time.
Thewalt points out, "A classical 1/0 bit can be thought of as a person being either at the North or South Pole, whereas a qubit can be anywhere on the surface of the globe"”its actual state is described by two parameters similar to latitude and longitude."
Make a practical quantum computer with enough qubits available and it could complete in minutes calculations that would take today's super-computers years, and your laptop perhaps millions of years.
Further details of this work have been published in the paper,
" Quantum Information
Storage for over 180 s Using Donor Spins in a 28Si "Semiconductor
Vacuum," by M. Steger et al, Science,
8 June 2012,
Vol. 336 no. 6086 pp. 1280-1283. DOI: 10.1126/science.1217635
