Rare Earth Crystal With High Benefits In Technology

Quantum computer

Quantum

A discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents.

Quantum is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction.

 what is quantum computing?

A quantum computing studies theoretical computation system that makes direct use of quantum- mechanical phenomena to perform an operation on data.

Quantum Internet

Researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) have taken major steps to provide practical building blocks for a global quantum internet.

There's a huge effort around the world to develop quantum computers. But these computers are not going to reach their full potential until they're networked. Because today's computers, they didn't reach their full potential, until we had the internet.

They are making use of the silvery-white solid metal when artificially isolated, natural erbium is always found in chemical combination with other elements. It is a lanthanide, a rare earth element, originally found in the gadolinite mine in Ytterby in Sweden, from which it got its name.

An erbium-doped crystal is uniquely suited to enable a global telecommunications network that harnesses the weird properties of quantum mechanics. An erbium-doped crystal is a perfect material to form the building blocks of a quantum internet that will unlock the full potential of future quantum computers.

Erbium, a rare earth ion, has unique quantum properties such that it operates in the same band as existing fiber optic networks, eliminating the need for a conversion process.

Quantum memories for light will be essential elements in future long-range quantum communication networks. These memories operate by reversible mapping the quantum state of light onto the quantum transitions of a material system. For networks, the quantum coherence times of these transitions must be long compared to the network transmission times, approximately 100 ms for a global communication network. Due to a lack of a suitable storage material, a quantum memory that operates in the 1,550 nm optical fiber communication band with a storage time greater than 1 μs has not been demonstrated. 

The unique advantage of our technology is that it operates in the same 1550 nanometer band as today's telecommunications infrastructure, making it compatible with the fiber optic cables found in existing networks.

This is a technique where we can use an erbium-doped material as a quantum memory.
 The erbium ions in a crystal can store quantum information for more than a second, which is 10,000 times longer than other attempts, and is long enough to one day send quantum information throughout a global network.
Coherence is an indication of how long you can hold onto or store a quantum state. erbium platform has a coherence time of more than one second. This should allow us to send quantum information over more than 1,000kms, and we think that it's long enough to potentially send the information around the entire globe. In addition to building quantum memories, we can now use these techniques to interface with silicon and superconducting qubits, two of the most promising types of quantum computers. This technology has the advantage that our memories interface directly with the optical fibre in the network that's currently in use. Other approaches are a lot more complicated, so they've been hard to implement in the real world. Erbium is special because it's the only element that will absorb and emit light at the telecommunications wavelength. The great thing about this platform is that we can use it to make quantum light sources, the other major component we need to make a quantum network. The result, is going to allow us to build the basic building blocks for the quantum internet. This is a technique where we can use an erbium-doped material as a quantum memory.

Not only is the material compatible with existing fibre optics, but it's versatility means it will be able to connect with many types of quantum computers, and superconducting qubits such as those being developed by Google and IBM.

This result is so exciting to me because it allows us to take a lot of the in-principle work have demonstrated and turn it into practical devices for a full-scale quantum internet.

Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.