Scientists have created an enhanced, ultra-pure form of silicon that could one day be the foundation for highly reliable"silicon-spin qubits" in powerful quantum computers.
But a key challenge with quantum computing is that qubits are"noisy," meaning they are highly prone to interference, such as temperature changes, and need to be cooled to near absolute zero. Otherwise, they easily lose information and fail midway through operations. But in a new study, published May 7 in the journal Nature Communications Materials, researchers proposed using a new, pure form of silicon — the semiconductor material used in conventional computers — as the basis for a qubit that is far more scalable than existing technologies.
Building qubits from semiconducting materials like silicon, gallium or germanium has advantages over superconducting metal qubits, according to the quantum computing company QuEra. The coherence times are relatively long, they are cheap to make, they operate at higher temperatures and they are extremely tiny — meaning a single chip can hold huge numbers of qubits. But impurities in semiconducting materials cause decoherence during computations, which makes them unreliable.
Si-29 in particular, which makes up 5% of natural silicon, causes a"nuclear flip-flopping effect" that leads to decoherence and the loss of information. In the study, the scientists got around this by developing a new method to engineer silicon without Si-29 and Si-30 atoms. —World's 1st fault-tolerant quantum computer launching this year ahead of a 10,000-qubit machine in 2026
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