Quantum Computing Milestone: Researchers Compute With 'Hot' Silicon Qubits (ieee.org) 18
"Two research groups say they've independently built quantum devices that can operate at temperatures above 1 Kelvin — 15 times hotter than rival technologies can withstand," reports IEEE Spectrum. (In an article shared by Slashdot reader Wave723.)
"The ability to work at higher temperatures is key to scaling up to the many qubits thought to be required for future commercial-grade quantum computers..." HongWen Jiang, a physicist at UCLA and a peer reviewer for both papers, described the research as "a technological breakthrough for semiconductor based quantum computing." In today's quantum computers, qubits must be kept inside large dilution refrigerators at temperatures hovering just above absolute zero. Electronics required to manipulate and read the qubits produce too much heat and so remain outside of the fridge, which adds complexity (and many wires) to the system...
"To me, these works do represent, in rapid succession, pretty big milestones in silicon spin qubits," says John Gamble, a peer reviewer for one of the papers and a senior quantum engineer at Microsoft. "It's compelling work...." Moving forward, Gamble is interested to see if the research groups can scale their approach to include more qubits. He's encouraged by their efforts so far, saying, "The fact that we're seeing these types of advances means the field is progressing really well and that people are thinking of the right problems."
Besides Microsoft, Google and IBM have also "invested heavily in superconducting qubits," the article points out. And there's also a hopeful comment from Lee Bassett, a physicist focused on quantum systems at the University of Pennsylvania. "Each time these silicon devices pass a milestone — and this is an important milestone — it's closer and closer to the inflection point.
"This infrastructure of integrated, silicon-based electronics could take over, and this technology could just explode."
"The ability to work at higher temperatures is key to scaling up to the many qubits thought to be required for future commercial-grade quantum computers..." HongWen Jiang, a physicist at UCLA and a peer reviewer for both papers, described the research as "a technological breakthrough for semiconductor based quantum computing." In today's quantum computers, qubits must be kept inside large dilution refrigerators at temperatures hovering just above absolute zero. Electronics required to manipulate and read the qubits produce too much heat and so remain outside of the fridge, which adds complexity (and many wires) to the system...
"To me, these works do represent, in rapid succession, pretty big milestones in silicon spin qubits," says John Gamble, a peer reviewer for one of the papers and a senior quantum engineer at Microsoft. "It's compelling work...." Moving forward, Gamble is interested to see if the research groups can scale their approach to include more qubits. He's encouraged by their efforts so far, saying, "The fact that we're seeing these types of advances means the field is progressing really well and that people are thinking of the right problems."
Besides Microsoft, Google and IBM have also "invested heavily in superconducting qubits," the article points out. And there's also a hopeful comment from Lee Bassett, a physicist focused on quantum systems at the University of Pennsylvania. "Each time these silicon devices pass a milestone — and this is an important milestone — it's closer and closer to the inflection point.
"This infrastructure of integrated, silicon-based electronics could take over, and this technology could just explode."
To summarize (Score:3, Informative)
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Is this a reference to non-locality of quantum effects and uncertainty principle?
1 K == -457.9 F ~= -272 C (Score:2)
Above 1K = "hot"? (Score:2)
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Not exactly beach weather, that’s for certain.
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AFAIK you can't go below 0 Kelvin by definition, so 15 times hotter means the competition has to run at around 0.067 Kelvin? Nice progress I suppose, but yikes anyway.
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It's just a mathematical trick to describe how energy levels are populated when there's more in the higher energy levels than in the lower. Our atmosphere gets thinner as you go up, described by a scale height of (mumble) kilometers - like a half life except distance up instead of radioactivity. If the air got denser as you go up, then it's be a negative scale height. Weird, but that's what happens in lasers with electrons and energy levels.
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Maybe I'm missing something but 1K is just above absolute zero. That requires a tremendous about of cooling to get to that temperature so I guess this means this news means a minor amount of progress?
Physical jargon abused by marketing to give an impression that is a lie.
Also not really any progress at all. Making the current completely worthless "computing capabilities" a bit cheaper, but not in any way larger.
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Well, there are several temperature thresholds that represent a large improvement in affordability. You usually get things down to extreme low temperatures by using a variety of very cold materials and refrigeration techniques that exploit the physical properties of these materials.
Liquid helium has a boiling point of 4.2K (and He3 performs even better at 3.19K, but good luck getting He3), liquid hydrogen has a boiling point of 20.28K, and liquid nitrogen has a boiling point of 77K, dry ice is 194K, and con
Wow (Score:2)
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Q: "Does this dress make me look fat?"
A: "I love your beautiful eyes."
Easy.
15 times hotter sounds defintely more exciting (Score:1)
Still does not scale (Score:2)
They are tweaking some constant factors here. That is completely meaningless as QCs still do not scale. For meaningful computation, you need a mass of entangled QBits that is totally out of reach (e.g. about 12k for breaking RSA-4096) and it looks more and more like it will remain out of reach forever. Unless and until they find something that brings down the effort increases on scaling (very likely exponential at this time), we will never see a QC of any useful size. But in that regards, there has been zer