Diamonds Key To Quantum Computing

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Scientists P. Neumann, N. Mizuochi & co. have advanced quantum computing by finding a new method to get two-way and three-way, high quality quantum correlations that persist for hundreds or thousands of microseconds, even at room temperature. Their paper (subscription required) describes how they manipulated electrons from nitrogen vacancies in diamond using microwaves to entangle adjacent carbon-13 nuclei. Even better, this builds on previous results which indicate that diamonds with nitrogen impurities may be the key to creating useful quantum computing devices. The article provides a good description of what nitrogen vacancies are and why they prove useful."

Comments

Re:How nice....

[Majik Sheff]

No, actually nitrogen impurities are the one thing keeping synthetic diamonds out of the jewelry market right now. Nitrogen turns diamonds a canary yellow, which can be considered desirable in fancy grades but is hardly desirable in the fiery rock category. Info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond

Re:How nice....

[Majik Sheff]

Oops, better picture here:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html

Re:Why diamonds?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

From TFA:

Carbon, the element which forms diamond, has four electrons available for bonding. To form diamond, the carbon atoms form a tetrahedral shape, where each carbon has four carbon neighbors, positioned evenly around the central atom. These atoms then share electrons, forming a very strong bond. If nitrogen is added during the formation of diamond, then some of the carbon positions will be taken by nitrogen. However, nitrogen has only three electrons available for bonding. Thus, every nitrogen atom is associated with a missing atom ^W electron in the tetrahedral. This imbalance leads to a very interesting situation, in which each vacancy is associated with a pair of electrons. In this case, the hardness of diamond is helpful because the atomic cores cannot move much, which helps preserve the quantum state of the electrons and nucleus. These robust quantum states are a necessary first step towards obtaining quantum computation.

Forehead whapping correction mine.

The whole notion isn't that different from doped silicon.

Re:Lab Made Diamonds

[hkmarks]

Natural diamonds are much more abundant than they'd have you believe. There's an artificial scarcity. Large, high quality diamonds are pretty rare, but there are plenty of small ones (enough to make tools out of them, and enough that diamond jewelery has next to no resale value.) The markup on new diamonds is huge and the supply chain is narrow.

Anyhow, isn't this whole thing the plot of the First Wave episode "The Apostles"? Except possibly without aliens? And probably fewer biker gangs?

Re:Lab Made Diamonds

[De Lemming]

Some more info:

• Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? - the classic Atlantic article about the De Beers Diamond cartel.
• Ten reasons why you should never accept a diamond ring

Re: Their paper (subscription required)

[mikael]

If you google search hard enough, you can usually find these papers free of charge from the originating university, either in the author's own website, or from a departmental archive.

I'm at an university, and even with a free Athens login from the campus library, our university still doesn't have a subscription to one or two of these companies. Basically, the subscription managers at the library will get a free trial or purchase a 1 years license with one of these companies. If enough papers are referenced, then the subscription is maintained, otherwise it is dropped.

Many research fields form their own cliques where they reference each others papers, and none from anybody else. If you are not in this clique, then it isn't worth taking out a subscription to that journal.

Fortunately, it is possible to get the jist of an unreadable paper by reading the descriptions from other papers.