(July 3, 2012) Harvard researchers create room-temperature
quantum bits that store data for nearly two seconds.
It’s a challenge that’s long been
one of the holy grails of quantum computing: how to create the key building
blocks known as quantum bits, or qubits, that exist in a solid-state system at
room temperature.
Most current systems, by
comparison, rely on complex and expensive equipment designed to trap a single
atom or electron in a vacuum and then cool the entire system to close to
absolute zero.
A group of Harvard scientists,
led by Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and including graduate students Georg
Kucsko and Peter Maurer and postdoctoral researcher Christian Latta, say
they’ve cracked the problem, and they did it by turning to one of the purest
materials on Earth: diamonds.
Using a pair of impurities in
ultra-pure, laboratory-grown diamonds, the researchers were able to create
quantum bits and store information in them for nearly two seconds, an increase
of nearly six orders of magnitude over the life span of earlier systems. The
work, described in the June 8 issue of Science, is a critical first step in the
eventual construction of a functional quantum computer, and has a host of other
potential applications.