“This will allow us to engineer the quantum logic operations between large arrays of individual atoms, retaining highly accurate operations across the whole processor,” Professor Morello said. Until now, implanting atoms in silicon has been a haphazard process, where a silicon chip gets showered with phosphorus which implants in a random pattern, like raindrops on a window.Ĭo-author, Scientia Professor Andrea Morello from the University of New South Wales said the new technique embedded phosphorus ions, precisely counting each one, in a silicon substrate creating a qubit 'chip', which can then be used in lab experiments to test designs for large scale devices. Now we can move the cantilever to the next spot and wait for the next atom.’” “That allows us to be very confident of our method. “One atom colliding with a piece of silicon makes a very faint click, but we have invented very sensitive electronics used to detect the click, it's much amplified and gives a loud signal, a loud and reliable signal,” Professor Jamieson said. Professor Jamieson said the team could “hear” the electronic click as each atom dropped into one of the 10,000 sites in the prototype device. The team discovered that the kinetic energy of the atom as it ploughs into the silicon crystal and dissipates its energy by friction can be exploited to make a tiny electronic ‘click’. Then the cantilever could move to the next precise position on the array. The key was knowing precisely when one atom – and no more than one – had become embedded in the substrate. The team drilled a tiny hole in this cantilever, so that when it was showered with phosphorus atoms one would occasionally drop through the hole and embed in the silicon substrate. The technique takes advantage of the precision of the atomic force microscope, which has a sharp cantilever that responds to the force fields above the surface of a chip with a positioning accuracy of just half a nanometre, about the same as the spacing between atoms in a silicon crystal. “We believe we ultimately could make large-scale machines based on single atom quantum bits by using our method and taking advantage of the manufacturing techniques that the semiconductor industry has perfected,” Professor Jamieson said. Lead author of the paper, Professor Jamieson said his team’s vision was to use this technique to build a very, very large-scale quantum device. The new technique – developed by Professor David Jamieson and co-authors from UNSW Sydney, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Leibniz Institute of Surface Engineering (IOM), and RMIT – can create large scale patterns of counted atoms that are controlled so their quantum states can be manipulated, coupled and read-out. Quantum computers could be constructed cheaply and reliably using a new technique perfected by a University of Melbourne-led team that embeds single atoms in silicon wafers, one-by-one, mirroring methods used to build conventional devices, in a process outlined in an Advance Materials paper.
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