QUANTA

Monday, April 4, 2011

 Physicists set new record: register with 14 quantum bits

April 4, 2011

Qbits Register

Controlled entanglement of 14 quantum bits using calcium atoms in an ion trap (credit: University of Innsbruck)

Physicists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria have achieved controlled entanglement of 14 quantum bits (qubits), realizing the largest quantum register ever produced.

The scientists have almost doubled the record for the number of entangled quantum bits realized experimentally. They confined 14 calcium atoms in an ion trap (similar to a quantum computer), and then manipulated them with laser light. The internal states of each atom formed single qubits and a quantum register of 14 qubits.

They discovered that the decay rate of the atoms is not linear, but is proportional to the square of the number of the qubits. When several particles are entangled, the sensitivity of the system increases significantly in a process known as superdecoherence, which has rarely been observed in quantum processing.

Source and/or read more: http://goo.gl/ZZbRM

Publisher and/or Author and/or Managing Editor:__Andres Agostini ─ @Futuretronium at Twitter! Futuretronium Book at http://3.ly/rECc