Silicon – made from beach sand – is the key material for today’s information technology industry because it is an abundant and versatile semiconductor.
Scientists are already building quantum devices made from silicon engineered with dopant atoms – impurities intentionally added from other elements to change the properties of silicon. These devices can be programmed with quantum states to form the qubits for a quantum computer.
However, the roadblock so far is that qubits are very susceptible even to tiny imperfections in their environment causing the qubit to lose its information (known as decoherence) requiring a reset of the computation.
The latest study by the University of Melbourne School of Physics researchers Dr Alexander Malwin Jakob and Professor David Jamieson with their Australian and international collaborators, demonstrates how to construct large arrays of single dopant atoms in a silicon chip, that could form the basis of a robust quantum computer.
