Jet Propulsion Laboratory / NASA
A huge number of ultracold atoms have been assembled into a record-breaking grid, which will serve to form the basis of the next largest quantum computer. The person largely responsible for this progress is Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The world’s largest known quantum computer has 1180 quantum bits (qubits), made of extremely cold, electrically neutral atoms.
As a note, one of the prerequisites for creating truly useful quantum computers is to make them bigger – build them with more qubits.
But the composition of these qubits is also important, and when they are made of ultra-cold atomsquantum computers only perform calculations accurately when each atom is in the right place within a very uniform grid.
A new investigation, the results of which were recently published in arXiv, used AI to bring 2,024 atoms together in an ultra-cold gridsetting the stage for a record-breaking new quantum computer.
The researchers used rubidium metal atomswhich they were able to cool and control with laser light.
They then created a grid of ‘optical tweezers’ made up of laser beams and they saw the atoms become trapped in some of their spots as they cooled them. Some grid points remained, however, unoccupied and some atoms were displaced.
One of the challenges of creating a grid of ultra-cold atoms is knowing the best sequence to move the tweezers and use them to rearrange the atoms – and that’s where technology comes in. AI, which is capable of fulfilling easily the task.
The algorithm suggested a sequence that produced the largest such grid to date, and it only took about 60 milliseconds to do it. The researchers estimated that this time would not increase for larger grids.
In fact, when they tried putting together more complicated shapes, like stacking three smaller grids on top of each other vertically or spelling out the letters “USTC” with the atoms in a pointillist style, the AI-generated rearranging sequence never took more than 60 milliseconds. .
It was the use of AI that made it possible to increase the grid to the new number atom record. This is because the AI divides it into sections and works on many of them in parallel.
As New Scientist points out, quantum computers made from trapped atoms and controlled by lasers have already demonstrated some of the best performance when it comes to correcting their own errors.
