Quantum Computing Processors Get a Performance Boost Thanks to Aussie Researchers

Quantum Computing Processors Get a Performance Boost Thanks to Aussie Researchers

Researchers at the University of New South Wales have broken new ground in quantum computing by extending processor performance by more than 100 times.

Quantum computing is set to change technology forever. Computer hardware reduced to a much smaller size than current technology with significant processing power, quantum computing is something that we’ll likely see in medicine, meteorology and in research sometime in the future.

And now, researchers at UNSW have pushed a quantum processor to its limits. See, previously it was expected that ‘spin qubits’, which are the properties of electrons in quantum technology that hold basic data, could only hold time for up to 20 microseconds. This study bumps that up by 100 times, up to 20 milliseconds.

And, look, that’s not much time, clocking in at two thousandths of a second, but it is quite a long time in quantum processing.

In quantum computing, the longer the qubits stay spinning, the better the chance that information can be maintained during calculations. When stopped, the information collapses. This research has found that, by changing the motion of the qubits and by having them move non-stop, the time that they can retain information can be massively improved.

Instead of having the qubits spinning in circles, the team rocked them back and forth. If an electric field is applied to an individual qubit, it can have a different tempo applied while still moving at the same rhythm.

“Longer coherence time means you have more time over which your quantum information is stored – which is exactly what you need when doing quantum operations,” said Amanda Seedhouse, a contributor to the study and a PhD student.

“The coherence time is basically telling you how long you can do all of the operations in whatever algorithm or sequence you want to do before you’ve lost all the information in your qubits.”

It’s a simple, alternative way that qubits can be controlled while also improving the performance of quantum computing systems.

However, it is still in the proof of concept stage. The team still needs to work out how to control qubits individually so that they can represent different values in a calculation.

“Our next goal is to show this working with two-qubit calculations after showing our proof of concept in our experimental paper with one qubit,” added Ingvild Hansen, the lead researcher on the project.

“Following that, we want to show that we can do this for a handful of qubits as well, to show that the theory is proven in practice.”

The research can be read in Physical Review A, Physical Review B and Applied Physics Reviews. Alternatively, you can read the press release on the UNSW website.


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