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Emerging Technology from the arXiv

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Scalable Quantum Computer Chip Technique Revealed

A technique that implants nitrogen vacancies into diamond at a rate of thousands per second could be the scalable technology that quantum computer scientists have been looking for.

  • July 8, 2010







The team say they can see these vacancies by making them photoluminesce and have even used them to store qubits and measured how long they remain coherent. In these first experiments, the coherence times are relatively poor, just a few microseconds rather than the few hundred that are known to be possible. The team says this can be improved with better control over the number of nitrogen ions that end up being implanted under each hole in the resist. In this experiment, some 30 ions ended up in a volume of diamond normally expected to carry only on ion.

Overall, this looks like an interesting step forward. An array of nitrogen vacancies that are easily addressable and coherent for hundreds of microseconds is a ready-made quantum register of the kind that quantum computer scientists have been crying out for.

Which means that the odds have suddenly improved of nitrogen vacancy technology winning this race and making scalable quantum computers possible for the first time.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1007.0240: Chip-Scale Nanofabrication Of Single Spins And Spin Arrays In Diamond

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