Quantum information, as well as quantum computing, is indeed a promising breakthrough in recent decades. Over the past several decades, Quantum Information Science had emerged significantly. This emerging field of science harnesses quantum mechanical effects enabling storage, transmission and processing information encrypted in systems that display unique quantum properties.
Researchers of Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Center (Finland) had developed a detector that can measure energy ‘quanta’. The detector “bolometer” can measure the energy of incoming radiation by estimating how much the detector heats up. It’s essential to measure the energy of qubits, which is the quantum analogue of the classical binary bit for quantum computing. Bolometer can now measure the energy of qubits, which was earlier determined by measuring the voltage induced by the qubit. Voltage measurement requires substantial amplification circuitry, and the circuitry requires huge power. Moreover, quantum noise contained in the voltage measurements creates an error in the qubit readout. While all these complications can be controlled using the new detector.
“Bolometers are now entering the field of quantum technology and perhaps their first application could be in reading out the quantum information from qubits. The bolometer speed and accuracy seems now right for it.” Says Professor Möttönen. The team initially developed a bolometer made out of gold- palladium alloy. This device could operate at low noise levels but it wasn’t fast enough to measure qubit energy. Later gold – palladium based bolometer was replaced by graphene, which essentially detects very small changes in energy, as graphene has a very low heat capacity. This property of graphene helps in faster detection, well below a microsecond. However noise level stills yielded quite a problem.
Hopefully, further research in this field could implement the smallest energy packets using bolometers in real-time. In addition, to measure the quantum properties of a microwave photon. This new discovery could unravel new possibilities in quantum technologies such as computation and information processes and to bring out these technologies from laboratories into real-world applications.
You might have missed out to read: Impact and Applications of Quantum Computing.
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