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Scientists have found a new way to create disturbances that do not fade away. Instead of relying on disorder to freeze things in place, they tipped a quantum container to one side—a trick that is easier to conjure in the lab. A collaboration between the experimental group of College Park Professor Christopher Monroe and the theoretical group of JQI Fellow Alexey Gorshkov, who is also a Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, has used trapped ions to implement this new technique, confirming that it prevents their quantum particles from reaching equilibrium. The team also measured the slowed spread of information with the new tipping technique for the first time. They published their results recently in the journal Nature.

Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have trained a small hybrid quantum computer to reproduce the features in a particular set of images. The result, which was published Oct. 18, 2019 in the journal Science Advances, is among the first demonstrations of quantum hardware teaming up with conventional computing power—in this case to do generative modeling, a machine learning task in which a computer learns to mimic the structure of a given dataset and generate examples that capture the essential character of the data.

Computers based on quantum physics promise to solve certain problems much faster than their conventional counterparts. By utilizing qubits—which can have more than just the two values of ordinary bits—quantum computers of the future could perform complex simulations and may solve difficult problems in chemistry, optimization and pattern-recognition.But building a large quantum computer—one with thousands or millions of qubits—is hard because qubits are very fragile. Small interactions with the environment can introduce errors and lead to failures. Detecting these errors is not straightforward, since quantum measurements are a form of interaction and therefore also disrupt quantum states. Quantum physics presents another wrinkle, too: It’s not possible to simply copy a qubit for backup.Scientists have come up with clever ways to detect errors and keep them from spreading. But so far, a complete error detection protocol has not been tested in experiments, partly due to the difficulty of creating controlled interactions between all of the necessary qubits.Now, in a recent article published in Science Advances, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute tested a full procedure for encoding a qubit and detecting some of the errors that occur during and after the encoding. They applied a scheme that distributed the information of one qubit among four trapped ytterbium ions—themselves also qubits—using a fifth ion qubit to read out whether certain errors had occurred. Ions provide a rich set of interactions, which allowed scientists to link the fifth ion qubit with the other four at will—a common requirement of error detection or correction schemes. With this approach, the scientists detected nearly all of the single-ion errors, performing more than 5000 runs of the full encoding and measurement procedure for a number of different quantum states. Additionally, the encoding itself didn’t appear to introduce errors on multiple ions at the same time, a feature that could have spelled doom for error detection and correction in ions.Although the result is an early step toward larger quantum memories and quantum computers, the authors say it demonstrates the potential of qubit protection schemes with trapped ions and paves the way toward error detection and eventually error correction on a larger scale.Written by Nina Beier

Large-scale quantum computers, which are an active pursuit of many university labs and tech giants, remain years away. But that hasn’t stopped some scientists from thinking ahead, to a time when quantum computers might be linked together in a network or a single quantum computer might be split up across many interconnected nodes.A group of physicists at the University of Maryland, working with JQI Fellow Christopher Monroe, are pursuing the second goal, attempting to wire up isolated modules of trapped atomic ions with light. They imagine many modules, each with a hundred or so ions, linked together to form a quantum computer that is inherently scalable: If you want a bigger computer, simply add more modules to the mix.In a paper published recently in Physical Review Letters, Monroe and his collaborators reported on putting together many of the pieces needed to create such a module. It includes two different species of ions: an ytterbium ion for storing information and a barium ion for generating the light that communicates with other nodes.This dual-species approach isolates the storage and communication tasks of a network node. With a single species, manipulating the communication ion with a laser could easily corrupt the storage ion. In several experiments, the researchers demonstrated that they could successfully isolate the two ions from each other, transfer information between them and capture light generated by both ions. 

The race to build larger and larger quantum computers is heating up, with several technologies competing for a role in future devices. Each potential platform has strengths and weaknesses, but little has been done to directly compare the performance of early prototypes. Now, researchers at the JQI have performed a first-of-its-kind benchmark test of two small quantum computers built from different technologies.The team, working with JQI Fellow Christopher Monroe and led by postdoctoral researcher Norbert Linke, sized up their own small-scale quantum computer against a device built by IBM. Both machines use five qubits—the fundamental units of information in a quantum computer—and both machines have similar error rates. But while the JQI device relies on chains of trapped atomic ions, IBM Q uses the movement of charges in a superconducting circuit.

Consider, for a moment, the humble puddle of water. If you dive down to nearly the scale of molecules, it will be hard to tell one spot in the puddle from any other. You can shift your gaze to the left or right, or tilt your head, and the microscopic bustle will be identical—a situation that physicists call highly symmetric.That all changes abruptly when the puddle freezes. In contrast to liquid water, ice is a crystal, and it gains a spontaneous rigid structure as the temperature drops. Freezing fastens neighboring water molecules together in a regular pattern, and a simple tilt of the head now creates a kaleidoscopic change.In 2012, Nobel-prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed something that sounds pretty strange. It might be possible, Wilczek argued, to create crystals that are arranged in time instead of space. The suggestion prompted years of false starts and negative results that ruled out some of the most obvious places to look for these newly named time crystals.Now, five years after the first proposal, a team of researchers led by physicists at the Joint Quantum Institute and the University of Maryland have created the world's first time crystal using a chain of atomic ions. The result, which finally brings Wilczek's exotic idea to life, was reported in Nature on March 9.