A major leap for practical building blocks of a quantum internet: New research from an Australian team demonstrates how to dramatically improve the storage time of a telecom-compatible quantum memory, a vital component of a global quantum network.
The technology operates in the same 1550 nanometre band as today’s telecommunications infrastructure. It can also be operated as a quantum light source or used as an optical link for solid-state quantum computing devices such as superconducting qubits and silicon qubits.
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These results were published in Nature Physics ([ Ссылка ]) on 11 September 2017.
CQC2T is the world's largest team undertaking fundamental research to create a universal quantum computing ecosystem.
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Matthew Sellars: There's a huge effort around the world to develop quantum computers. But these computers are not going to reach their full potential until they're networked. Because today's computers, they didn't reach their full potential, until we had the internet.
Rose Ahlefeldt: When we started doing this, we really weren't expecting this to work as well as it did. It was exciting! A versatile telecom quantum memory is one of the basic building blocks of a quantum network.
Matthew Sellars: What we've done is to develop a technique where we can use an erbium-doped material as a quantum memory.
Miloš Rančić: Erbium is one of the rare earth elements; they're some of the heaviest elements on the periodic table and they're not actually that rare. You'll find them in a lot of objects around you, like fluorescent lights or old TV sets. We intend to use this material for sending quantum information over really long distances.
Matthew Sellars: We had the idea to do this quite a few years ago and a lot of the feedback we got was that it wouldn't work. Now that we've tried it, it actually worked a whole lot better than we thought it was going to.
Miloš Rančić: Coherence is an indication of how long you can hold onto or store a quantum state. Our platform has a coherence time of more than one second. This should allow us to send quantum information over more than 1,000kms, and we think that it's long enough to potentially send the information around the entire globe. In addition to building quantum memories, we can now use these techniques to interface with silicon and superconducting qubits, two of the most promising types of quantum computers.
Matthew Sellars: Our technology has the advantage that our memories interface directly with the optical fibre in the network that's currently in use.
Rose Ahlefeldt: Other approaches are a lot more complicated, so they've been hard to implement in the real world.
Miloš Rančić: Erbium is special because it's the only element that will absorb and emit light at the telecommunications wavelength.
Rose Ahlefeldt: The great thing about this platform is that we can use it to make quantum light sources, the other major component we need to make a quantum network.
Matthew Sellars: I'm really excited about this result, because it's going to allow us to build the basic building blocks for the quantum internet.
VIDEO ENDS
