Sandia Labs researcher provides more details about steps towards “a quantum bus”

Sandia National Laboratories researcher Ryan Camacho today provided Etopia News with further details about recent research there that is opening the way for further advances in quantum computing.  He wrote:

“Connecting quantum computers requires a quantum bus—a communications channel that can successfully transfer quantum states to other quantum processors without destroying them (quantum states are very fragile!).  What we’ve done (Sandia and Harvard) is place two distinct quantum emitters, which are also quantum absorbers, exactly where we want them and then connect their quantum states with high fidelity via photons.  This is the first time this has been accomplished on a chip, and while much more work will have to be done to connect actual functioning quantum computers, this is an important step.  It’s kind of the Morse code stage of quantum communications on a chip.  Building on these tools, we’ll hopefully be able to move to the analogous 'voice' and 'data' phases we’ve seen in classical communications and connect much more sophisticated end-nodes.

“In the meantime, the connected quantum emitters may also be useful for other important tasks in metrology, medicine and probably other things we haven’t even thought of.  When the quantum states of the atoms are connected, the atoms’ themselves become correlated, and can behave like a single atom, just with more energy states.  Atoms can be terrific field sensors, and the fact these quantum-correlated atoms can now be distributed across a chip points to some interesting opportunities in distributed atomic sensing.  Since diamond micro-particles are known to be bio-friendly, there might be some medical applications that could make use of this as well.”

For more background on this subject, see "Q & A and explanations of Sandia-Harvard quantum computing breakthrough."