A University of Washington-led team has made a key quantum computing breakthrough by detecting fractional quantum anomalous Hall states in semiconductor material flakes, which could be instrumental in creating stable, fault-tolerant qubits.
Quantum computing could revolutionize our world. For specific and crucial tasks, it promises to be exponentially faster than the zero-or-one binary technology that underlies today’s machines, from supercomputers in laboratories to smartphones in our pockets. But developing quantum computers hinges on building a stable network of qubits — or quantum bits — to store information, access it and perform computations.
Yet the qubit platforms unveiled to date have a common problem: They tend to be delicate and vulnerable to outside disturbances. Even a stray photon can cause trouble. Developing fault-tolerant qubits — which would be immune to external perturbations — could be the ultimate solution to this challenge.
A team led by scientists and engineers at the University of Washington has announced a significant advancement in this quest. In a pair of papers published on June 14 in Nature and June 22 in Science, they report that, in experiments with flakes of semiconductor materials — each only a single layer of atoms thick — they detected signatures of “fractional quantum anomalous Hall” (FQAH) states. The team’s discoveries mark a first and promising step in constructing a type of fault-tolerant qubit because FQAH states can host anyons — strange “quasiparticles” that have only a fraction of an electron’s charge. Some types of anyons can be used to make what are called “topologically protected” qubits, which are stable against any small, local disturbances.
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