Quantum World

Quantum chips, a new technique to build them

The universe is composed of thousands of different phenomena and processes, some of them, difficult to understand and analyze, scientists are in constant search of a physical law that helps to explain everything, and during all this process they discover new techniques and procedures, which allow us to reduce the gap between the unknown and what we can understand.

Among those discoveries, we have a new technique to elaborate quantum chips. First, let's remember that the main characteristic of these quantum microchips is that the atoms that make them up are used as a structural unit.

This new technique places individual atoms, one by one, on silicon disks, using the precision of an atomic microscope to touch the surface of a chip with the precision of half a nanometer, the space between atoms in a silicon crystal.

In addition to being a novel technique, it is significantly cheaper to create chips for quantum computers. A cheap but effective qubit chip.

Previously chips were made by implanting many atoms in random locations and selecting the ones that worked best, with the new ordered array, it is similar to the transistor chips we know.

Although the process began by chance, when a signal was detected each time an atom fell on the surface. Scientists increased the signal and managed to control the process with equipment, including sensitive X-ray detectors and an atomic force microscope, the same one that was developed for the Rosetta space mission.

Scientists are currently preparing and testing single- and multi-atom devices, as well as independent evaluation methods for this purpose.

Although they are looking to design and manufacture large-scale equipment based on single-atom quantum bits, it will be some time before we see this process of mass fabrication.

You can read about the whole process at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202103235

01 de Febrero, 2022