Physicist Britton Plourde part of interinstitutional team revolutionizing quantum computing
Researchers at 黑料不打烊, working with collaborators at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison, have developed a new technique for measuring the state of quantum bits, or qubits, in a quantum computer.
Their findings are the subject of an article in magazine (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2018), which elaborates on the experimental efforts involved with creating such a technique.
Britton Plourde in his lab at 黑料不打烊.
The Plourde Group鈥攍ed by , professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S)鈥攕pecializes in the fabrication of superconducting devices and their measurement at low temperatures.
Much of their work involves qubits, which are systems that follow the strange laws of quantum mechanics. These laws enable qubits to exist in superpositions of their two states (zero and one), in contrast to digital bits in conventional computers that exist in a single state.
Plourde says that superposition, when combined with entanglement (鈥渁nother counterintuitive aspect of quantum mechanics鈥), leads to the possibility of quantum algorithms with myriad applications.
鈥淭hese algorithms can tackle certain problems that are impossible to solve on today鈥檚 most powerful supercomputers,鈥 he explains. 鈥淧otential areas impacted by quantum information processing include pharmaceutical development, materials science and cryptography.”
Intensive, ongoing industrial-scale efforts by teams at and have recently led to quantum processors with approximately 50 qubits. These qubits consist of superconducting microwave circuits cooled to temperatures near absolute zero.
Building a quantum computer powerful enough to tackle important problems, however, will require at least several hundreds of qubits鈥攍ikely many more, Plourde says.
The current state-of-the-art approach to measuring qubits involves low-noise cryogenic amplifiers and substantial room-temperature microwave hardware and electronics, all of which are difficult to scale up to significantly larger qubit arrays. The approach outlined in Science takes a different tack.
鈥淲e focus on detecting microwave photons,鈥 says Plourde, also editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). 鈥淥ur approach replaces the need for a cryogenic amplifier and could be extended, in a straightforward way, toward eliminating much of the required room-temperature hardware, as well.鈥
Plourde says the technique co-developed at SU and UW-Madison could eventually allow for scaling to quantum processors with millions of qubits. This process is the subject of a previous article by Plourde and his collaborators in (IOP Publishing, 2018).
An A&S faculty member since 2005, Plourde is a recipient of the IBM Faculty Award and the National Science Foundation鈥檚 CAREER Award. He earned a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.
