Researchers at the Universities of Melbourne and Manchester have invented a breakthrough technique for manufacturing highly purified silicon that brings powerful quantum computers a big step closer.
The new technique to engineer ultra-pure silicon makes it the perfect material to make quantum computers at scale and with high accuracy.
There is something called as quantum coherence, wherein, the errors in the quantum process tends to add up, resulting in a final large error. Since we are in the infant stages of quantum computing, the tolerance of quantum systems and its corresponding qubits to these errors are quite weak. So, we can say that today’s quantum computers are still in the fault-intolerant zone.
As quoted by Professor Curry, who is the co-supervisor at the University of Manchester, “What we’ve been able to do is effectively create a critical ‘brick’ needed to construct a silicon-based quantum computer. It’s a crucial step to making a technology that has the potential to be transformative for humankind.”
Professor Jamieson said the new highly purified silicon computer chips house and protect the qubits so they can sustain quantum coherence much longer, enabling complex calculations with greatly reduced need for error correction.
Silicon, as we know, is a very crucial semiconductor material for making chips. Its great versatility, high resistance to corrosion and a relatively high melting point(1414 degrees Celsius), makes it the most suited material as of now for making semiconductor chips for quantum computers. In order to improve the purity of the obtained silicon, a new and novel method has been devised for high efficiency of quantum systems.
“The great news is to purify silicon to this level, we can now use a standard machine – an ion implanter – that you would find in any semiconductor fabrication lab, tuned to a specific configuration that we designed,” Professor Jamieson said.