Researchers from the University of New South Wales have broken new ground in quantum computing by demonstrating that 'spin qubits'- qubits where the information is stored in the spin momentum of an electron- can store data for up to two milliseconds, 100 times longer than previous benchmarks in the same quantum processor.
Classical computers work with bits—consisting of ones and zeroes—but a quantum computer uses quantum bits or qubits, which, on top of the ones and zeroes, also has a superposition where it can be a one and a zero at the same time. Because of this, operations on qubits can amount to a large number of computations in parallel.
The time that qubits can be manipulated in increasingly complex calculations is known as 'coherence time.'
"Longer coherence time means you have more time over which your quantum information is stored—which is exactly what you need when doing quantum operations. The coherence time is basically telling you how long you can do all of the operations in whatever algorithm or sequence you want to do before you've lost all the information in your qubits," says Ph.D. student Ms. Amanda Seedhouse, whose work in theoretical quantum computing contributed to the achievement.
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