Quantum Computing – Atoms Used As Data Storage!
A team of top scientists from two leading Universities and the US Department of Energy have claimed they have stored information inside an atom’s nucleus.
The team came from American Princeton University and the UK’s Oxford University (and U.S. Department of Energy), where they used a phosphorus atom embedded inside a silicon crystal for the experiment. They used both the nucleus and electron, which the scientists report behave like time “quantum magnets”, storing quantum information (i.e. a very small amount of it).
Now, all this isn’t exactly news. In fact, information had previously been stored inside a single nucleus before – but on that occasion only for 1/10 of a second. Not a massive amount of use to those of us in the real world, at first glance. Not enough o break the one second barrier, in fact.
But the new team have managed to retain accessibility of the information for a whopping “nearly two seconds” this time! And if that still sounds fairly useless, in quantum computing the one second barrier was an important one to break, as researchers studying quantum computing had calculated that if only such a system (known as a quantum system) could be made to store data for a minimum of one second, the data could in fact be protected for an indefinite period by using “error correction techniques”.
Steve Lyon, Princeton University’s team leader said, “Nobody really knew how long a nucleus might hold quantum information in this system…With crystals painstakingly grown by the Berkeley team and very careful measurements, we were delighted to see memory times exceeding the threshold.”
A research fellow from Oxford (St. John’s College) said, “The electron acts as a middle-man between the nucleus and the outside world… It gives us a way to have our cake and eat it–fast processing speeds from the electron, and long memory times from the nucleus.”
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