

The researchers used the Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility at the University of Chicago to produce the devices.46 The word of the L ord that came to Jeremiah the prophet c concerning the nations. Schuster is a member of the James Franck Institute and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. Liang Jiang of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and visiting researcher Hyeokshin Kwon of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in South Korea. Naik (now at UC Berkeley) and Nelson Leung (now with Radix Trading) postdoctoral researcher Wen-Long Ma (now with the Institute of Semiconductors at the Chinese Academy of Sciences) Prof. Other co-authors were graduate students Akash Dixit and Andrew Oriani former UChicago students Ravi K. Graduate student Kevin He was the other first author on the paper.


It's really quite neat to 'see' a quantum interaction with your eye," said UChicago postdoctoral researcher Srivatsan Chakram, the co-first author on the paper, now an assistant professor at Rutgers University. In our system, we can measure single photons in any of our notes, and watch the effect of the interaction as it happens. "Normally quantum interactions take place over length and time scales too small or fast to see. No one has observed anything like these interactions in nature, so the researchers also hope the discovery can be useful for simulating complex physical phenomena that can't even be seen here on Earth, including perhaps even some of the physics of black holes.īeyond that, the experiments are just fun. The researchers are also excited about the behavior itself. With an operation as complex as a quantum computer, engineers want to simplify everywhere they can, Schuster said: "If you wanted to build a quantum computer with 1,000 bits and you could control all of them through a single bit, that would be incredibly valuable." Their experiments only tested up to five "notes" at a time, but the scientists could eventually imagine running hundreds or thousands of notes through a single qubit to control them. But this system has them all interacting at the same time." "If you add a third, they're usually still interacting sequentially with one or the other. "Normally, most particle interactions are one-on-one - two particles bouncing or attracting each other," Schuster said. To have so many photons "talking" to one another in a lab experiment is extremely strange, akin to seeing a cat walking on hind legs. "At first the photons don't interact at all, but when the total energy in the system reaches a tipping point, all of a sudden, they're all talking to each other." "Here we do something even weirder," Schuster said. With painstaking preparation, scientists can sometimes prompt two photons to react to each other's presence. In nature, photons hardly ever interact - they simply pass through each other. "Just like in the musical instrument," Schuster said, "you can send one or several wavelengths of photons across the whole thing, and each wavelength creates a 'note' that can be used to encode quantum information." The researchers can then control the interactions of the "notes" using a master quantum bit, a superconducting electrical circuit.īut their oddest discovery was the way the photons behaved together. The cavity is made by drilling offset holes - like holes in a flute. The system they devised consists of a long cavity made in a single block of metal, designed to trap photons at microwave frequencies. In this experiment, they were working with particles of light, known as photons, in the microwave spectrum. David Schuster's lab works on quantum bits - the quantum equivalent of a computer bit - which tap the strange properties of particles at the atomic and sub-atomic level to do things that are otherwise impossible. Described in two studies published in Physical Review Letters and Nature Physics, the breakthrough could point the way towards realizing quantum memories or new forms of error correction in quantum computers, and observing quantum phenomena that cannot be seen in nature.Īssoc.
