An international team of scientists from Australia, Japan, and the United States has created a prototype of a large-scale quantum processor made entirely of laser light.
The concept of such a processor was developed a little over ten years ago, this processor has a scalable architecture that allows increasing the number of quantum computing nodes, consisting of light, almost to infinity.
Modern quantum processors are large, complex, and expensive devices whose architecture is difficult to scale up large,”the researchers write.
The approach we have chosen is initially focused on scaling due to the fact that the processor, called the group state, is made entirely of light.
A cluster state is a large number of entangled quantum components that allow you to perform quantum computing, transfer information, and perform all the necessary basic functions.
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“In order for the group state to be used in the real world, it must be both large and have the correct structure of entanglement of elements. In a decade of research in this direction, not a single created group state has been workable, having failed in one of two or both cases, "- the researchers write," Our implementation was the first to succeed in all respects."
To create a group state, scientists used special crystals that convert ordinary laser light into a special quantum form called squeezed light. This compressed light, transmitted through a complex system of mirrors, optical splitters, optical fibers and other optical components, makes it possible to obtain a two-dimensional group state in the working space, 5 by 1240 nodes in size. Each node is a separate quantum component (qubit) capable of independently or jointly with others to process quantum information.
And although the compression ratio of this state, which determines its quality, is still small for solving practical computational problems, everything indicates that the principles chosen by scientists are workable and in the near future they will be able to obtain the required compression ratio of the group state.
“In our work, we have created a large-scale group state, the structure of which already allows performing some quantum computations,” the researchers write. “All this is the very first demonstration that the underlying ideas are workable, the creation of a“light”quantum processor is feasible, and the architecture created is scalable to any level of complexity."
