Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Jay Gambetta of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) and a team of physicists from Yale University recently created a two-qubit superconducting quantum processor, ground-breaking research to be published in Nature next month.
"A quantum processor executes algorithms by applying a programmable sequence of gates to an initialized register of qubits, which coherently evolves into a final state containing the result of the computation," explains Gambetta. "Simultaneously meeting the conflicting requirements of long coherence, state preparation, universal gate operations, and qubit readout makes building quantum processors challenging." Few-qubit processors have already been shown in nuclear magnetic resonance, cold ion trap and optical systems, however, a solid-state realization has remained an outstanding challenge.
This new research demonstrates a two-qubit superconducting processor and the implementation of the Grover search and Deutsch-Jozsa quantum algorithms. "We employed a novel two-qubit interaction, tunable in strength by two orders of magnitude on nanosecond time scales, which is mediated by a cavity bus in a circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) architecture," says Gambetta. This interaction allows generation of highly-entangled states with concurrence up to 94%.
Future research efforts will be focused on increasing qubit coherence times, gate performance and register size in order to create a functional technology.Dr. Gambetta joined IQC as a postdoctoral fellow in October 2007 under the supervision of Dr. Raymond Laflamme and Dr. Joseph Emerson. The advanced release of Dr. Gambetta's full research paper, "Demonstration of Two-Qubit Algorithms with a Superconducting Quantum Processor's" is available online on Nature's website.
About IQC: Founded in 2002, the mission of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) is to aggressively explore and advance the application of quantum mechanical systems to a vast array of relevant information processing techniques.
A part of the University of Waterloo, IQC creates a truly unique environment that fosters cutting-edge research and collaboration between researchers in the areas of computer, engineering, mathematical and physical sciences.
At the time of this release, IQC has 18 faculty members, 20 postdoctoral fellows and over 65 students and research assistants, as well as a support staff of 13.