Researchers Discover How To Control Quantum Information at Room Temperature

Extreme environmental conditions that mimic outer space have been required to minimize “noise” when using particles to perform calculations for quantum computing. Scientists have discovered how to control quantum dots at room temperature which brings humanity one step closer towards our inevitable quantum-driven technological revolution.

Overview

Scientific breakthroughs in quantum computing are happening at an astounding rate. I recently published an article about a milestone related to qubit stability. In that I talk about how metallic-based qubits seem much easier to control and measure vs. photon(light)-based qubits.

Just this week, I’ve learned that scientists have started using rubidium (an alkali metal) vapor as a form of quantum memory demonstrating deterministic storage and retrieval of light!

Several unrelated studies are pointing to a hybrid solution of light and metals to bring us the speed and stability needed to move quantum computing forward. Add the ability to control particles at room temperature and we’ll be progressing towards commercial viability faster than the speed of light! Yes, that’s an “entanglement” joke😅

Let’s go over how we got here.

Polaritonic Quantum Dots for Displays

Polaritons are “half-light half-matter” hybrid particles, having both the characteristics of photons and solid matter.

In this SciTechDaily article, they talk about this study where scientists demonstrate the electric tunability of a single polaritonic quantum dot operating at room temperature by dynamically controlling the Rabi frequency with corresponding polariton emission through a method called “electric-field tip-enhanced strong coupling spectroscopy.” That basically means they’ve found a way to control the color and brightness of the light emitted by the particle.

The article makes the research seem focused on display technology, but it’s founded in the same principles used in quantum computing. For example, Rabi oscillations are used to manipulate qubits. Here’s a quick visual reminder of how this works, from this fun video I found:

Quantum dots have been an area of exploration for use as qubits, but I personally feel light is just inherently difficult to control.

That specific article does mention optical communications, which ties into the next seemingly unrelated breakthrough.

Quantum Internet

With the potential of faster than light data transmission by leveraging quantum entanglement, which is instantaneous, and unprecedented security through the collapse of data upon conscious observation, quantum internet would be the backbone of our quantum-driven technical revolution.

This StudyFinds article covers how scientists engineered the quantum dot to emit light at existing telecommunication-band wavelengths. By taking this approach, they have bypassed one of the biggest hurdles toward quantum networking becoming a reality, which is infrastructure.

What’s interesting to me is that this study includes use of metallic atoms using “rubidium“. They describe it as a rubidium vapor–based quantum memory, with a total internal memory efficiency of (12.9 ± 0.4)%. That’s not so great! They would need to see much better results before it could be considered commercially viable. However, they’ve proven it can work.

This lack of memory efficiency makes me wonder if the methods that Microsoft and Quantinuum used with logical qubits could be applied to quantum dots and metallic-based quantum memory.

My Thoughts

I’m curious how Quantinuum’s ion-trap performs at room temperature and outside a vacuum. Could their approach to using electromagnetic fields be applied to rubidium-based memory to stabilize it. Could Quantinuum’s Ytterbium and Barium ions be used to store photon data? Would using multi-particle ions improve memory efficiency? Would creating logical qubits out of photon-based physical qubits improve their stability at room temperature? Would polaritonic quantum dots improve qubit stability at room temperature?

Obviously, I’m left with more questions than answers! Researchers aren’t going team up to answer my questions, but I personally feel that there are some viable areas worth exploring here. This is certainly a topic that I’ll be keeping an eye on and will be sure to share as I learn more.

Header Image

This article’s Stable Diffusion image took me way too long to generate something I liked, so I decided to go with something a bit more abstract.

Prompt: professional 3d model quantum mechanics photon pixel . octane render, highly detailed, volumetric, dramatic lighting
Negative prompt: ugly, deformed, noisy, low poly, blurry, painting
Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M SDE Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 1299325317, Size: 1344×768, Model hash: 9e9fa0d822, Model: dreamshaper_331BakedVae, Style Selector Enabled: True, Style Selector Randomize: False, Style Selector Style: 3D Model, Version: v1.6.1