The world's first portable, room-temperature quantum computer with more than 10 qubits utilizes flawed lab-made diamonds. The quantum system fits into a standard server rack and connects to a typical power grid.
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A German startup has debuted the world's first diamond-based quantum computing system to exceed 10 qubits.
The machine, built by engineers at Saxon Q, is a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) quantum computer, meaning it uses defects in synthetic diamonds as quantum bits (qubits) to perform quantum operations. Qubits can be manipulated to represent the 0s and 1s of data, as well as quantum states that are superpositions of both the 0s and the 1s.
The hardware is currently available in rack-mounted systems featuring up to 128 qubits, with 512-qubit configurations available for delivery next year. According to the company's road map, the goal is to scale to 10,000 qubits and beyond after 2030.
Although the technology existed before this debut, scientists have found it difficult to build systems beyond 10 qubits due to the difficulty of creating nitrogen vacancy qubits.
Although Live Science saw a technical white paper outlining how the technology works, there didn't appear to be any published research demonstrating a functional quantum computer based on the NV architecture operating with more than 10 qubits before this launch. It's still unclear exactly how well the firm's quantum computers stack up against other platforms.
In the 1970s, scientists discovered that certain diamonds shone with a brilliant red light when illuminated in a specific way. Subsequent research determined that the optical shift was caused by annealing radiation damage that attracted isolated substitutional nitrogen atoms. In other words, nature occasionally produces a diamond that has a nitrogen atom where a carbon atom should be.
The unintegrated nitrogen atoms are drawn to the vacancy in the otherwise perfectly ordered carbon atoms inside the diamond. Although these flawed diamonds occur rarely in nature, scientists can create diamonds with nitrogen vacancies in laboratories.
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Functionally, the single nitrogen atoms inside the vacancies act as if they were "trapped," and their electrons can "spin" independently of the electrons inside the surrounding carbon atoms.
Scientists exploit this "spin" feature by using special lasers to put the nitrogen atom's electrons in a specific state they measure as "zero." They can then use microwave pulses to precisely manipulate the electrons into numerous configurations, including quantum states that binary "bits" can't achieve.
We have a fully functioning quantum computer.
Marius Grundmann, a professor of experimental physics at Leipzig University and co-founder of Saxon Q, said the breakthrough that allowed his firm to push past the 10-qubit barrier was a materials discovery.
When the Saxon Q team creates the vacancy inside its lab-grown diamonds, they co-implant sulfur. Per Grundman, “That's the key technology point. Because the sulfur lifts the chemical potential to a point that it's negatively charged. The sulfur supplies the electron; the sulfur also makes the vacancy attached to the nitrogen with a very high yield."