UNSW Sydney research demonstrates a 20x improvement in resetting a quantum bit to its '0' state, using a modern version of the 'Maxwell's demon'.
A team of quantum engineers at UNSW Sydney has developed a method to reset a quantum computer – that is, to prepare a quantum bit in the '0' state – with very high confidence, as needed for reliable quantum computations. The method is surprisingly simple: it is related to the old concept of 'Maxwell's demon', an omniscient being that can separate a gas into hot and cold by watching the speed of the individual molecules.
"Here we used a much more modern 'demon' – a fast digital voltmeter – to watch the temperature of an electron drawn at random from a warm pool of electrons. In doing so, we made it much colder than the pool it came from, and this corresponds to a high certainty of it being in the '0' computational state," says Professor Andrea Morello of UNSW, who led the team.
"Quantum computers are only useful if they can reach the final result with very low probability of errors. And one can have near-perfect quantum operations, but if the calculation started from the wrong code, the final result will be wrong too. Our digital 'Maxwell's demon' gives us a 20x improvement in how accurately we can set the start of the computation."
The research was published in Physical Review X, a journal published by the American Physical Society.
Watching an electron to make it colder
Prof. Morello's team has pioneered the use of electron spins in silicon to encode and manipulate quantum information, and demonstrated record-high fidelity – that is, very low probability of errors – in performing quantum operations. The last remaining hurdle for efficient quantum computations with electrons was the fidelity of preparing the electron in a known state as the starting point of the calculation.
"The normal way to prepare the quantum state of an electron is go to extremely low temperatures, close to absolute zero, and hope that the electrons all relax to the low-energy '0' state," explains Dr Mark Johnson, the lead experimental author on the paper. "Unfortunately, even using the most powerful refrigerators, we still had a 20 per cent chance of preparing the electron in the '1' state by mistake. That was not acceptable, we had to do better than that."
Dr Johnson, a UNSW graduate in Electrical Engineering, decided to use a very fast digital measurement instrument to 'watch' the state of the electron, and use real-time decision-making processor within the instrument to decide whether to keep that electron and use it
