Quantum computing made a breakthrough

The field of quantum computing has just witnessed a major advancement thanks to recent scientific progress.

With the help of a two-qubit gate, a research team from the Japanese Institute for Molecular Science has made a big step forward in quantum computing.

A qubit is the quantum version of a binary bit, which is a basic unit of information used in computers.

In just 6.5 nanoseconds, the team was able to make the world's fastest two-qubit gate.

Researchers had to work around some of the problems that come with this kind of technology.

But there's a catch: the way they did it might be hard to do again outside of a research setting.

Quantum computing is still a bit of an unknown, but it could be the key to solving problems that modern computers can't handle.

It could also make high-performance computing (HPC) jobs go a lot faster.

Even though the potential is there and tech giants like IBM and Intel are using it, there are also some limits. This is why research teams all over the world keep looking into the topic.

Scientists from the Institute for Molecular Science led by graduate student Yeelai Chew, assistant professor Sylvain de Léséleuc, and professor Kenji Ohmori did the research and published their results in Nature Photonics.

They were able to use a two-qubit gate, which is an early but important step.

After the first article about the process appeared online in Nature, Tom's Hardware was one of the first publications to explain how it worked.

Researchers used lasers to cool down two atom-qubits by a large amount.

Qubits are the quantum version of the bits we all use every day to work with computers.

But qubits have a benefit: they don't have to be either one or zero. Instead, they can be both one and zero.

This makes them much more effective and gives them the key to doing complicated tasks in a much, much shorter amount of time.

Unfortunately, qubits quickly lose their coherence, which means they no longer give correct answers.

For a two-qubit gate operation to work, the qubits must be entangled, and this entanglement can be sped up by a number of things.

There are two ways to deal with the problem of decoherence: either the operations need to be done much faster, before the qubits lose their order, or the entanglement needs to last longer.

The science team chose the first option, which was to speed things up a lot, and they did that. In the process, they set a world record.

Researchers used lasers to cool down two atom-qubits made of the element Rubidium by a large amount.

Temperatures got as low as 273.15 degrees Celsius, which is very close to absolute zero.

Then, optical tweezers were used to move these atoms so that they were all within a micrometre of each other.

Then, at 10 picosecond intervals, they used a laser to change the qubits.

One trillionth of a second is equal to one picosecond.

Researchers were able to make a quantum gate work in just 6.5 nanoseconds by following the steps above. This is the fastest two-qubit gate operation in the world.

Before that, the fastest time was 15 nanoseconds.

Even though this is a big step, it doesn't mean that everyone will start using quantum computing right away. It does, however, show that scientists are making a lot of progress in that direction.

Unfortunately, it might be hard to copy this kind of technology in an HPC setting, which is where it would be used most often.

Researchers used qubits made of rubidium atoms to make this ultrafast qubit gate. For this to work, the qubits must be cooled close to absolute zero.

In some situations, it may be possible to do so, but most organisations would probably choose a different solution until it becomes easier to handle.

On the other hand, even if this technology doesn't become the standard one day, the research is still important because scientists are still trying to figure out where computing is going.