Communications of the ACM
Quantum Computing Can Go Chemical With Molecular Qubits
Northwestern University researchers are making qubits out of organometallic molecules, hoping to build extended networks of such molecules that could advance quantum computers.
Credit: Shutterstock
Researchers at Northwestern University are making qubits out of organometallic molecules, hoping to build extended networks of such molecules that could advance quantum computers.
Northwestern's Danna Freedman works with qubit molecules that are vanadium (IV) complexes. The transition metal's unpaired electron is the information-carrying unit, while the rest of the molecule is less relevant in quantum terms. "
We're trying to eliminate sources of decoherence, that is the things that collapse the superposition state," says Freedman.
The team is using IBM's 20-qubit processor at ultra-low temperatures to avoid thermal movement that can destroy the superconducting circuits' superposition. To eliminate decoherence stemming from nuclear spin, the researchers surround the vanadium center with low nuclear spin atoms such as sulfur, carbon, or oxygen.
The longest-lived qubit stays in superposition for almost 1ms at 10K, which the researchers say is a good amount of time to execute an operation.
From Chemistry World
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2018 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found