- Arguably, the biggest engineering challenge for quantum computers is dealing with the instability of these systems due to errors.
- Now, new research from scientists from Australia and Poland says that creating a kind of quantum circuit board using time crystals could help solve these problems by propagating qubits and storing them.
- This concept, called “time-tronics,” could form the basis of reliable quantum computers.
Quantum computers, by their very name, to scream “the future”—but it is a future that is apparently still decades away. That’s because building one of these machines is a fascinating engineering topic that relies on superconductors, qubits (a little thing that’s in superposition so it’s all “1” and “0”), and lots of other fascinating quantum weirdness. And worst of all, qubits are also prone to errors. The details are more about mistakes.
That’s not the problem with quantum computers, but with qubits themselves. Because when the qubits interact to perform a calculation, they reduce themselves, which leads to errors.
Now, a new survey has been sent to the print server arXiv, and scientists in Australia and Poland, say that using time crystals as a type of electronic board for next-generation computers can lead to reliable systems by “enabling quantum gates to work on all sets of qubits,” according to the authors. As with electronics, they coined the term “time-tronics” to describe their new breakthrough.
“These devices can match more than three dimensions and can be seamlessly connected and reconfigured at any time,” the paper said. “Our findings show that the limitations faced by building materials using conventional crystals can be overcome by adopting crystal materials in time.”
Although it sounds like a mindless name for a fantasy film MacGuffinTime crystals are a small part of things that are not actually crystals – not the way our three dimensional mind thinks of them. While the average crystal consists of complex, repeating atoms, time crystals have a movement in time, which makes them repeating in time rather than space.
According to The New Scientist, this style is what makes time crystals ideal for a computer circuit board because qubits “can spread and move all the time.” This makes interactions between qubits, including connections between distant qubits that are currently impossible in modern quantum computers, easier and produces more reliable results.
“As any connection between sites can be controlled, it is possible to detect multiple devices,” the paper said.
“We show that a printed circuit board can contain qubits, where all single-qubit operations can be performed and a Z-controlled gate can be performed between qubit pairs, achieving the content of a universal computer.”
Moving forward, the team is focusing on creating time crystals using the Bose-Einstein condensate of Potassium-39, which was chosen for its ability to allow scientists to better control interactions between atoms. If it works, this advancement will not change the computing power in the long term, but it will bring one big step closer to solving what has been described as a “critical problem”.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his past stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
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