Ya’ll heard about metamaterials–that stuff they made invisibility cloaks outta at Duke University last year. It’s mighty strange stuff and it’s about to get a lot weirder in a quantum kinda way.
Metamaterials get their properties from their structure rather than their composition. So chuck a few capacitors, inductors and wires into an eggbox and you gotta material that gives electromagnetic waves some squeezin and a-bendin like nothin’ else on Earth. Metamaterials can bend light backwards, introduce a reverse Doppler shift and turn Cherenkov radiation on its head. But until now they’ve always bin made o’ proper classical bricks n’ mortar.
Now Alexander “Five Fingers” Rakhmanov, currently vacationin’ at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Japan, says it’s possible to build metamaterials outta quantum building blocks. He and a few pals have come up with a design in which two superconducting rails are connected at regular intervals by tiny superconducting junctions which store a current. These currents (and their direction) can be thought of as bits of quantum information or qubits.
So what ya got here is a line of qubits that can be placed in a quantum superposition.
Now here’s the interestin’ bit. Send an electromagnetic wave down this line and it interacts with superposition of qubits in some mighty fascinatin’ ways. Five Fingers Rakmanov says that by tweaking the qubits, the device can become a photonic crystal with a transparency bandgap that “breathes”, that is changes in size periodically. Or it can behave like an Archimedean Screw which modulates the incident wave and pumps the regions of maximum amplitude along the qubit line at any chosen speed.
That looks like one excitin’ piece o’ kit. Now it’s up to one o’ you guys to rush out ‘n’ build it.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0709.1314: Quantum Metamaterials: Electromagnetic Waves in a Josephson Qubit Line