Fred Palma | Computer Scientist

Yale University scientists have accomplished two major steps toward achieving true quantum computing–sending a photon signal on demand from a qubit onto wires and transmitting the signal to a second, distant qubit. Applied physics professor Robert Schoelkopf and physics professor Steven Girvin have spent several years exploring the use of solid-state devices resembling microchips for use in a quantum computer. Their breakthrough means that quantum computing has moved past simply “having information” to “communicating information.” Previously, information in quantum systems was only able to move from qubit to qubit. Schoelkopf and Girvin have engineered a superconducting communication “bus” to store and transfer information between distant quantum bits, the first step to making the fundamentals of quantum computing useful, according to Schoelkopf. The first breakthrough is the ability to produce and control single, discrete microwave photons as the carriers of encoded quantum information. “In this work we demonstrate only the first half of quantum communication on a chip–quantum information efficiently transferred from a stationary quantum bit to a photon or ‘flying qubit,’” says Schoelkopf. “However, for on-chip quantum communication to become a reality, we need to be able to transfer information from the photon back to a qubit.” The researchers accomplished that in their second breakthrough by adding a second qubit and using the photon to transfer a quantum state from one qubit to another.
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