When it comes to qubits, the quantum equivalent of computer bits, bigger is usually better.
But its also much noisier.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
Essentially, scientists just sort of smash things around until the desired result emerges.
The researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics took a different route.
It is deterministic in the sense that no probabilistic entangling gates are required.
This gives us a clear scaling advantage over previous schemes.
Typically, photons (individual units of light) are entangled inside of a special kind of crystal.
This results in a key in of entanglement thats relatively unpredictable.
Scientists struggle to generate qubits effectively using this method because its probabilistic.
In other words, they were able to generate stable entangled photons nearly half the time.
This allowed them to perform longer, more accurate measurements on the photons themselves.
This could very well represent a eureka moment on par with Googles recent discovery oftime crystals.
The upside here is that the scientists were able to generate their results with a single atom.
This indicates that the technique would be useful outside of computing.
