Imagine a document tray that you fill with one document at a time. At some point there is no longer room for more documents.
Then imagine that the same tray has room for twice the amount of paper, without the tray getting bigger or the documents getting smaller. Rather, the staircase “borrows” space from an additional, invisible staircase.
Imagine also that the box does not exist in space but in time.
Do you also feel like your brain is short-circuited?
At least that’s what a group of researchers from several American universities have done. They created a new state of matter, in which atoms behave as if they were in two time dimensions at the same time.
their recent results Published in the journal Nature.
Stable quantum computers
The new state should make quantum computers more stable, as their fragility is one reason why they are so uncommon so far.
A classical computer is made of qubits (the basic unit of information), while a quantum computer is based on quantum qubits – also called qubits. It can be very similar to atoms stored with data.
Ordinary computer qubits process information in one of two states – 1 or 0. Qubits, on the other hand, can be 1, 0, or both at the same time. So it can have several values at the same time.
This phenomenon is called superposition and it allows electricity to be conducted in several directions at the same time, which is the secret behind the power of a quantum computer.
One of the problems with qubits is that they are difficult to keep in the quantum state – that is, having multiple values at the same time – for a long time at a time. It causes inaccuracies in quantum computers.
Fibonacci sequence triggers cases
One way to make qubits more powerful is to blast them with a pulsed laser, which the researchers behind the new case have done.
The laser pulse creates what are called time symmetry – stable patterns – that hold the qubits in place and make them more resistant to change. But only for a short while at a time, before they lose their quantum properties.
The researchers wanted to see if they could find a way to make qubits retain their quantum properties for longer periods of time.
The laser pulse has a rhythm that moves in time. The researchers will add an additional time symmetry to the same laser pulse.
To add this “extra” time, the researchers tried to create a structured rhythm that didn’t repeat itself at the same time.
It was inspired by the Fibonacci sequence, where each number is the sum of the two previous numbers. It is a system, in which a series of words is built up and a sequence is formed that is never repeated.
In the first test, the researchers fired an ordinary laser beam at a quantum computer using atoms. There, the computer remained in a quantum state for 1.5 seconds, which is a long time by comparison.
During the second test, a Fibonacci-inspired laser pulse was fired and the system remained in a quantum state for 5.5 seconds, the lifetime of the quantum computer.
It might be hard to imagine, but because the atoms were bombarded with a laser beam of roughly two beats at the same time, it got additional consistency from a non-existent time dimension.
The atoms acquired the properties from the extra dimension of time, giving them extra protection so they could stay in a quantum state for much longer.
The next step now will be to incorporate this new double-time-like atomic state into functional quantum computers.
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