MIT and Brookhaven National Laboratory, in collaboration with Element Six, a provider of synthetic diamond supermaterials, have demonstrated a significant step toward a synthetic diamond quantum information processor.
Using nano-engineered synthetic diamond the team fabricated optical structures around specific atom-like defects in the diamond lattice while maintaining exceptional quantum properties. The impurities, called nitrogen-vacancy centres, have shown significant promise in recent years as quantum bits, or qubits, that can serve as memories and logic elements in quantum communication or even quantum computing.
The Element Six team worked closely with Professor Dirk Englund at MIT to define diamond material required which was fabricated using chemical vapour deposition techniques. The structures exhibit a coherence time around 200µs, about a hundred times longer than previously reported memory times in such quantum interfaces. This is a significant increase in the coherence time in a structured diamond which forms an important step toward building large-scale quantum systems consisting of many interconnected quantum memories.
Englund commented: ‘Synthetic diamond is an ideal host material for such atom-like qubits. Element Six has led the way in producing high-purity synthetic diamond that has made this advance possible for our team.’
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