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'Flip-Flop Qubits' - Radical New Quantum Computing Design Invented

Building a quantum computer has been called the 'space race of the 21st century' - a difficult and ambitious challenge with the potential to deliver revolutionary tools for tackling otherwise impossible calculations. Engineers at Australia's University of New South Wales  have developed a completely new architecture for quantum computing, based on what they're calling 'flip-flop qubits.' The breakthrough promises to make the eventual large-scale manufacture of quantum chips much cheaper and easier. The new chip design allows for a silicon quantum processor that can be scaled up without the precise placement of atoms required in other approaches. Importantly, it allows quantum bits (or 'qubits') – the basic unit of information in a quantum computer – to be placed hundreds of nanometers apart and still remain coupled. The design sidesteps a challenge that all spin-based silicon qubits were expected to face as teams begin building larger and larger arrays of qubits: the need to space them at a distance of only 10-20 nanometers, or just 50 atoms apart.

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 a quantum computer is not just a faster computer it's a machine that can solve problems that are completely intractable by any modern computer no matter how powerful but to really outperform a super computer the quantum computer must be built using many Quantum bits or cubits all individually controlled and coupled to each other in a large array our team at unsw has already established

    00:00:24 the record of performance for single cubits in the solid state our cubits are individual atoms of f for implanted inside a silicon chip very similar to those that power all modern computers and smartphones we've made cubits out of both the electron and the nucleus of the phosphorus atom but because they are atomic size systems you would normally need to place them a few atoms apart so

    00:00:48 that the electrons touch each other to perform Quantum calculations we have now discovered that this is not necessary we can make the phosphorous cubits talk to each other over much larger distances at one condition that we encode Quantum information in the combined state of the electron and the nucleus for example we incode a zero in the electron down nucleus up combination and a one in the

    00:01:12 electron up nucleus down we called it the flip-flop Cubit it is operated by pulling the electron away from the nucleus and then oscillating the electron position around its equilibrium point this means that we can now control a cubit in Silicon using elect instead of magnetic signals this makes it much easier to integrate with normal electronic circuits and once the

    00:01:37 negative charge of the electron is pulled away from the positive charge of the nucleus the Cubit creates an electric field that reaches over large distances so we can now design a large scale quantum computer where there's plenty of space to insert interconnects control lines and read out devices without having to fabricate components at the scale of a few atoms this is a

    00:02:00 major shift in the way we can build silicon quantum computers using flipflop cubits instead of normal cubits will allow us to manufacture large arrays of cubits without having to push the limits of fabrication of conventional electronic devices so it's a quicker and more economical way to build a quantum computer that is big enough to start having an impact in the world