Them quantum eggheads have long been a-huntin and a-scramblin to find the perfect building blocks for their quantum computers. They looked at photons, electrons, ions, neutral atoms and quantum dots. In fact there ain’t much they haven’t looked at.
Now Elena “Coolhand” Kuznetsova and chums at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge says the answer has been staring everbody in face all along: carbon monoxide. Yep, a single molecule of hosepipe gas is the perfect place to put a qubit.
Here’s why quantum monoxide is so good. The dream qubit needs to be well protected from sources of decoherence. Qubits stored in electrons and ions, for example, decohere almost instantly. Sneeze and they’re gone. But a qubit stored in the electronic states of a quantum monoxide molecule is pretty robust, says Coolhand Kuznetsova.
Qubits also need to be able to interact with each other so that the information they contain can be processed. This is where photons fall down, getting two photons to talk to each other is almost impossible (although one or two bods have had some impressive success with nonlinear optical methods).
That ain’t a problem for quantum monoxide molecules since they can be made to interact via various coupling mechanisms.
The only problem now is to build a computer based on quantum monoxide. That’s where Coolhand and her pals fall badly behind cos their work is strictly theoretical and everyone else is outta their starting blocks and well into their stride.
Any experimentalists out there fancy takin’ this on?
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0710.4356: Schemes for Robust Quantum Computation with Polar Molecules: Analysis of Experimental Feasibility