Posted on 04/08/2012 11:20:22 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Scientists at the University of Southern California have created a computer within a diamond to test quantum computing theories. This research could lead to super computer speeds, but for the present is still in the experimental stage. A gratuitous tip of the hat to The Weazmeister for the linkage.
A qubit can represent a 0 and a 1 at the same time. This is thanks to the quantum property of superposition, and it’s the property that may one day make quantum computers insanely fast.
(Excerpt) Read more at enthusiast.hardocp.com ...
Don't believe they allow excerpts.
I can get a cubic zirconium computer for half price from a guy on the street.
As fast as a liberal calling someone a racist before they know the facts? No way, nothing is that fast.
How cool is this! When I get bored, I can just tune into the computer in my tux stud!
By Robert Perkins on April 5, 2012 7:30 AM
Diamonds are forever - or, at least, the effects of a diamond on quantum computing may be.
A team that includes scientists from USC has built a quantum computer in a diamond, the first of its kind to include protection against “decoherence” - noise that prevents the computer from functioning properly.
The demonstration showed the viability of solid-state quantum computers, which - unlike earlier gas- and liquid-state systems - may represent the future of quantum computing because they can easily be scaled up in size. Current quantum computers typically are very small and, though impressive, cannot yet compete with the speed of larger, traditional computers.
The multinational team included USC professor Daniel Lidar and USC postdoctoral researcher Zhihui Wang, as well as researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Iowa State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. The findings were published today in Nature.
The team’s diamond quantum computer system featured two quantum bits, or qubits, made of subatomic particles.
As opposed to traditional computer bits, which can encode distinctly either a one or a zero, qubits can encode a one and a zero at the same time. This property, called superposition, along with the ability of quantum states to “tunnel” through energy barriers, some day will allow quantum computers to perform optimization calculations much faster than traditional computers.
Like all diamonds, the diamond used by the researchers has impurities - things other than carbon. The more impurities in a diamond, the less attractive it is as a piece of jewelry because it makes the crystal appear cloudy.
The team, however, utilized the impurities themselves.
A rogue nitrogen nucleus became the first qubit. In a second flaw sat an electron, which became the second qubit. (Though put more accurately, the “spin” of each of these subatomic particles was used as the qubit.)
Electrons are smaller than nuclei and perform computations much more quickly, but they also fall victim more quickly to decoherence. A qubit based on a nucleus, which is large, is much more stable but slower.
“A nucleus has a long decoherence time - in the milliseconds. You can think of it as very sluggish,” said Lidar, who holds appointments at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Though solid-state computing systems have existed before, this was the first to incorporate decoherence protection - using microwave pulses to continually switch the direction of the electron spin rotation.
“It’s a little like time travel,” Lidar said, because switching the direction of rotation time-reverses the inconsistencies in motion as the qubits move back to their original position.
The team was able to demonstrate that its diamond-encased system does indeed operate in a quantum fashion by seeing how closely it matched “Grover’s algorithm.”
The algorithm is not new - Lov Grover of Bell Labs invented it in 1996 - but it shows the promise of quantum computing.
The test is a search of an unsorted database, akin to being told to search for a name in a phone book when you’ve only been given the phone number.
Sometimes you’d miraculously find it on the first try, other times you might have to search through the entire book to find it. If you did the search countless times, on average, you’d find the name you were looking for after searching through half of the phone book.
Mathematically, this can be expressed by saying you’d find the correct choice in X/2 tries - if X is the number of total choices you have to search through. So, with four choices total, you’ll find the correct one after two tries on average.
A quantum computer, using the properties of superposition, can find the correct choice much more quickly. The mathematics behind it are complicated, but in practical terms, a quantum computer searching through an unsorted list of four choices will find the correct choice on the first try, every time.
Though not perfect, Lidar and Wang’s computer picked the correct choice on the first try about 95 percent of the time - enough to demonstrate that it operates in a quantum fashion.
The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative funded the study.
I don’t understand how this could work. If a qubit can rep 1 or 0 at the same time how could that be processed? Is this similar to the John Kerry computer that he was against it while for it?
Very interesting, thanks for the post.
Now, diamonds are more than just a girl’s best friend. :)
I think that's great. Quantum Computing will open up the Software Engineering career field to a whole generation of students who can't grasp Boolean logic.
I smell BS.
It doesn't really matter whether the answer is 0 or 1 as long as the qubit feels good about it.
This is very interesting. I read that Michael Crichton book Timeline a few years back where he described how quantum computers work (or could work), and if I remember right, he said something like it operates in a multiverse or a parallel universe. That although the qubit is 1 and 0 at the same time, time does not exist on that level. Wooooosh........right over my head.
Made in China?
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Grover's algorithm is a quantum algorithm for searching an unsorted database with N entries in O(N1/2) time and using O(logN) storage space (see big O notation). It was invented by Lov Grover in 1996.
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