Computation on a 1mm Thick Diamond
A team of scientists including scientists from University of Southern California (USC) has successfully used the flaw present in a 1mm thick piece of diamond as qubits and perform calculations. In this little device, two qubits were featured; nitrogen nucleus behaves as one qubit and free electron as another. Actually, the nucleus and the electron in this little chunk of diamond are impurities. These impurities decrease the value of diamonds and due to such type of impurities the crystal becomes cloudy.
Qubit is a bit of information with ability to express both 0 and 1 (binary digits) at the same time. This property is known as “superposition” and is considered to be the basis of quantum computing. Presently, “bits” are more commonly used which can express only 0 or 1 at a time.
The device which is made of diamond and can do quantum computation is a solid state device. The qubits on that device are in a solid matrix rather than in the form of a gas or a liquid. This little computer has an advantage of being protected from “decoherence” i.e. disturbance that causes disturbance in the proper functioning of computer.
This research has been published online in the journal Nature.
This research has been funded by National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.
(Photo: 1mmX 1mm diamond in the center, Credit:Delft University of Technology and UC Santa Barbara)
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