The UNSW members
of the team: L-R: Dr Matthew House, Sam Hile (seated),
Scientia Professor
Sven Rogge and Scientia Professor Michelle Simmons of the
CQC2T laboratories
at UNSW. Image: UNSW
(October 30, 2015) Researchers
at UNSW and the University of Melbourne have designed a 3D silicon chip architecture
based on single atom quantum bits, providing a blueprint to build a large-scale
quantum computer.
Australian scientists have designed a 3D silicon chip
architecture based on single atom quantum bits, which is compatible with
atomic-scale fabrication techniques – providing a blueprint to build a
large-scale quantum computer.
Scientists and engineers from the Australian Research
Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication
Technology (CQC2T), headquartered at UNSW, are leading the world in the race to
develop a scalable quantum computer in silicon – a material well-understood and
favoured by the trillion-dollar computing and microelectronics industry.
Teams led by UNSW researchers have already demonstrated a
unique fabrication strategy for realising atomic-scale devices and have
developed the world’s most efficient quantum bits in silicon using either the
electron or nuclear spins of single phosphorus atoms. Quantum bits – or qubits
– are the fundamental data components of quantum computers.
Australian
researchers have figured out a way to deal with errors in quantum computers,
giving them the
essential architecture that may help this team become the first
to build a
functioning quantum computer in silicon.
One of the final hurdles to scaling up to an operational
quantum computer is the architecture. Here it is necessary to figure out how to
precisely control multiple qubits in parallel, across an array of many
thousands of qubits, and constantly correct for ‘quantum’ errors in
calculations.
Now, the CQC2T collaboration, involving theoretical and
experimental researchers from the University of Melbourne and UNSW, has
designed such a device. In a study published today in Science Advances, the
CQC2T team describes a new silicon architecture, which uses atomic-scale qubits
aligned to control lines – which are essentially very narrow wires – inside a
3D design.