The road to making faster and more powerful quantum computers could be paved with one precious stone called cuprite. Her unique properties have long made it useful for quantum research, but a new experiment could provide a stepping stone to transform computing.
Cuprite is a precious stone formed by Cu2O and is found in many places, but the only large cuprite crystals come from a single mine in Namibia, which is thought to be depleted. Although it has a nice red tinge, which leads it to be known as ruby copperit is not widely used in jewelry as it is too soft and the stones are usually tiny, while almost all cuprites large enough to be of interest to jewelers come from a mine in Onganja, Namibia.
Why is cuprite so important?
Cuprite is important to physicists because produces Rydberg excitons (quasiparticles made up of bonded combinations of electrons and electron holes) extraordinarily large and therefore easier to study. A team led by Dr Hamid Ohadi of the University of St Andrews announced that it has coupled light to Rydberg cuprite excitons, creating the largest hybrid matter-light particles ever created, and the results are published in the journal Nature Materials.
Einstein showed that energy (including light) and matter are equivalent, they give or take the division by the speed of light squared, while instead the Rydberg polaritons form a bridge between the two, alternating between light and matter, and in their state of matter, they can interact with each other, opening the door to a type of quantum computer known as a quantum simulator.
Like all quantum computers, quantum simulators break the binary where information must be stored as zeros or ones, allowing them to be stored as somewhere in between. allows you to run concurrently processes that existing computers run sequentially.
While quantum simulators cannot perform as wide a range of functions as other quantum computers are theoretically capable, they are suitable for solving some important scientific problemsand hopefully they can allow us to understand the behavior of atoms at very low temperatures and the folding structurefor example, in ways that could lead to breakthroughs in superconducting and pharmaceutical design.
Building quantum computers is one of the great science projects of the 21st century, with many different projects being studied, all with advantages and disadvantages over the rest.
“Building a quantum simulator with light is the holy grail of science. We have taken a huge step forward in this sense by creating Rydberg polaritons, the key ingredient of it “
Ohadi stated in a note.
The polaritons were created by polishing an Onganja cuprite crystal until it is thinner than human hair – just 0.03 millimeters (0.0012 inches) thick – and placing it between two ultra-reflective mirrors. The light was then trapped between the two mirrors, passing through the crystal to create Ryberg polaritons 0.5 μm wide, 100 times larger than those previously produced.
The next step is to control the polaritons to form quantum circuits.
The Onganja mine was closed and flooded many years ago so synthesis of large cuprite stones could become a priority if you can’t find another natural source but luckily this team managed to get one on eBay .
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