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Led by Prof Richard Curry of University of Manchester, the team says their ‘breakthrough’ in creating pure silicon solves a major problem in quantum computing.
While silicon forms the basis for most classical computers in use today, a team of international scientists has made a potential breakthrough in using the material for future scalable quantum computers.
The new, ultra-pure form of the element silicon could help scientists create more stable qubits – essential for the functioning of a quantum computer.
Traditional computers use bits to store and manipulate information, but quantum computers rely on quantum bits or qubits. The ability to reliably control a qubit is an important achievement for realising functional quantum computers in the future. However, even the smallest changes in environment can cause a quantum system to become unreliable.
Now, the team led by Prof Richard Curry of the Advanced Electronic Materials group based in the University of Manchester thinks it has found a solution to the problem.
“What we’ve been able to do is effectively create a critical ‘brick’ needed to construct a silicon-based quantum computer,” Curry said after the study was published in Nature’s Communications Materials journal last week.
“It’s a crucial step to making a technology that has the potential to be transformative for humankind – feasible; a technology that could give us the capability to process data at such as scale, that we will be able to find solutions to complex issues such as addressing the impact of climate change and tackling healthcare challenges.”
Silicon is the material of choice for classical computers because of its ability to be an efficient semiconductor. But natural silicon consists of three different isotopes (atoms of the same element with different mass): silicon 28, 29 and 30. According to the team, silicon consists of a nearly 5pc Si-29, which is responsible for a phenomenon known as “nuclear flip-flopping” that causes silicon-based qubits to lose information and render the computer dysfunctional.
Curry and the team, which included scientists from the University of Melbourne, have devised a way to remove the Si-29 and Si-30 atoms from silicon to create an ultra-pure form of the material that can pave the way for functional quantum computers.
Ravi Acharya, a PhD researcher who is lead author of the study, said this “breakthrough” in creating pure silicon solves a major problem in quantum computing.
“The great advantage of silicon quantum computing is that the same techniques that are used to manufacture the electronic chips – currently within an everyday computer that consist of billions of transistors – can be used to create qubits for silicon-based quantum devices,” he said.
“The ability to create high quality silicon qubits has in part been limited to date by the purity of the silicon starting material used.”
Researchers around the world have been working on different approaches to create a functional quantum computer – technology that could revolutionise everything from climate studies and finance to drug discovery in medicine.
Last month, Microsoft and UK-based Quantinuum said they got a step closer to the commercial quantum computer with a new breakthrough that significantly reduces error while running experiments.
Microsoft claimed that the breakthrough finally moves us out of the current era of unreliable quantum computing, known as noisy intermediate-scale quantum, ushering in the next stage of resilient quantum computing.
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