ChemistryEquipment: Flawed diamonds are perfect ingredients for quantum computing, just add time travel

Monday, April 9, 2012

Flawed diamonds are perfect ingredients for quantum computing, just add time travel

Ready to suspend your brain cells in a superposition of disbelief? Good, because the latest news published in Nature is that diamonds are a quantum computer's best friend -- particularly if they're flawed. An international team of scientists sought out sub-atomic impurities in a 1mm-thick fragment of over-priced carbon and used these as qubits to perform successful calculations. A "rogue" nitrogen nucleus provided one qubit, while a free electron became a second. Unlike previous attempts at solid-state quantum computing, this new effort used an extra technique to protect the system from decoherence errors: microwave pulses were fired at the electron qubit to "time-reverse" inconsistencies in its spinning motion. Don't fully get it? Us neither. In any case, it probably won't stop jewellers tut-tutting to themselves.

Flawed diamonds are perfect ingredients for quantum computing, just add time travel originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 Apr 2012 06:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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