Scientists and researchers have been chasing their dream of building a quantum computer or many years now. Recently, however, a team of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico, have managed to link, or bridge, together two quantum computers with a single chip.
What they have seemingly managed to do is to join separate quantum computers at an atomic scale and they believe that the future may hold bridging many of these smaller computers into one giant quantum network. Perhaps, it is being said, the key to building a quantum computer is to actually fuse together many smaller ones. The process is now quite similar to the standard parallel computation.
The process, it seems, is also quite similar to some manner of teleportation. A particular challenge or problem is broken up into small pieces and sent from one computer to another where the data is re-assembled into a coherent answer to the said problem. The Sandia experiments have been published in the recent edition of the journal, Science.
The ultimate challenge for scientists, they say, is the linking of photons. These light particles, as well as quantum emitters, which are, essentially, atoms that eject photons, travel and take on different frequencies that must be combined at the end of the teleportation.
The Sandia researchers wrote that, “Efficient interfaces between photons and quantum emitters are central to applications in quantum science, but are challenging to implement due to weak interactions between single photons and individual quantum emitters. Despite advances in the control of microwave and optical fields…the realization of integrated quantum devices where multiple quibits are coupled by optical photons remains an outstanding challenge.”
The quibits are the tiny pieces of information that are carried by the photons. Sandia researcher Randy Camacho said that, “What we’ve done is implant the silicon atoms exactly where we want them. We can create thousands of implanted locations, which all yield working quantum devices, because we plant the atoms well below the surface of the substrate and anneal them in place.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Sandia