Nano-diamonds colour road to quantum computer

With a hint of alchemy, University of Melbourne scientists have shot carbon atoms into glass and by adding a bit of heat, turned them into nanometre-sized diamonds with properties that could create help create a quantum computer.

Professor Steven Prawer and a team from the University's Department of Physics have managed to manufacture these nano-diamonds using nothing more than a common furnace and they are now working to exploit a unique property of these nano-diamonds to create a quantum computer.

Quantum computers are expected to far surpass the capabilities of today's most powerful supercomputers.

Pure diamonds contain only carbon atoms and are transparent. Any impurities will usually give them a variety of colour states. The impurity in Professor Prawer's nano-diamonds is a single nitrogen atom that has kicked out one of the carbon atoms.

The nitrogen atom creates what is known as the colour centre, or NV centre (Nitrogen Vacancy centre) in a diamond. This centre has a spare electron hanging around that can be in either an 'excited' or 'ground' (unexcited) state. Researchers at the Australian National University have shown this excited state has the potential to work in the same way as a 1 and 0 does in the binary system of programming in today's computers.

Prof. Prawer is now working to create arrays of these nano-diamonds with single NV-centres. Arrays will allow them to scale up the computing power of any quantum computer giving it enormous potential to advance areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data mining.

Item provided courtesy of The University of Melbourne