Ravi Acharya, a PhD researcher who performed experimental work in the project, explained: “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.
The ability to create high quality Silicon qubits has in part been limited to date by the purity of the silicon starting material used. The breakthrough purity we show here solves this problem.”
The new capability offers a roadmap towards scalable quantum devices with unparalleled performance and capabilities and holds promise of transforming technologies in ways hard to imagine.
Project co-supervisor, Professor David Jamieson, from the University of Melbourne, said: “Our technique opens the path to reliable quantum computers that promise step changes across society, including in artificial intelligence, secure data and communications, vaccine and drug design, and energy use, logistics and manufacturing.
“Now that we can produce extremely pure silicon-28, our next step will be to demonstrate that we can sustain quantum coherence for many qubits simultaneously. A reliable quantum computer with just 30 qubits would exceed the power of today’s supercomputers for some applications,”
What is quantum computing and how does it work?
All computers operate using electrons. As well as having a negative charge, electrons have another property known as ‘spin’, which is often compared to a spinning top.
The combined spin of the electrons inside a computer’s memory can create a magnetic field. The direction of this magnetic field can be used to create a code where one direction is called ‘0’ and the other direction is called ‘1’. This then allows us to use a number system that only uses 0 and 1 to give instructions to the computer. Each 0 or 1 is called a bit.
In a quantum computer, rather than the combined effect of the spin of many millions of electrons, we can use the spin of single electrons, moving from working in the ‘classical’ world to the ‘quantum’ world; from using ‘bits’ to ‘qubits’.
While classical computers do one calculation after another, quantum computers can do all the calculations at the same time allowing them to process vast amounts of information and perform very complex calculations at an unrivalled speed.
“The University of Manchester is a public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester City Centre on Oxford Road.”
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