3D-printing could make it easier to make large quantum computers
An ion trap used for corral two beryllium ions above a gold micropuce
Y. Colombe / National Institute of Standards and Technology / Science Photo Library
To enlarge certain quantum computers, and therefore more powerful, we may have to print them 3D.
Currently, there is no consensus on the best design for quantum computers, but researchers are suitable that to become unambiguously, quantum computers will have to be enlarged. For those who use ions like quantum or qubits, a key construction block is called “ion trap”. Hartmut Häffner at the University of California in Berkeley, and his colleagues have now developed a 3D printing technique for miniaturized ion traps, which could facilitate the combination of many of them in a large computer.
The purpose of an ion trap is just in his name: he confines the ions in place and helps control their quantum states with electromagnetic fields, an essential condition for the use of ions to execute calculations.
For their version, 3D 3D printed researchers were only a few hundred microns. In in-depth laboratory tests, they beat more conventional conceptions. They captured ions up to 10 times more efficiently and did it with shorter waiting times from the moment the trap is activated at the moment when the ions can be used, explains Häffner. “You can evolve to an order of magnitude more qubits, and you can accelerate things,” he said.
The member of the Xiaoxing Xia team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California said that 3D printing is a perfect correspondence for the problem to be accomplished, because it can make small complex objects with less constraints than methods more similar to the manufacture of fleas. This means that researchers could follow the success of their tiny ion trap with more innovative and new conceptions. The member of the Shuqi Xu team, also at the University of California in Berkeley, says that some are already in preparation. “3D printing allows you to reinvent things to a large extent,” says Xia.
The methods currently used to make ion traps “suffer from complexity, inherent limitations and sometimes low yield, high costs and poor reproducibility. It seems to me that the 3D printing scheme could possibly overcome all these problems … which is in turn a key prerequisce for the quantum computing scalability with trapped ions ”.
Xia says that the team now wants to integrate optical components into their 3D printed conceptions, such as miniaturized lasers necessary for quantum computers. Häffner adds that their tiny traps could help rethink mass spectrometers, which are omnipresent tools in chemistry.
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