Quantum decoherence Stamp'ed ?
A major advance in predicting and quashing environmental decoherence, a phenomenon that has proven to be one of the most formidable obstacles standing in the way of quantum computing has been made at UBC & UC Santa Barbara.
UBC's Philip Stamp has been able to theoretically predict and hence control, all the environmental decoherence mechanisms in a very complex system, particularly the large magnetic molecule Iron-8. Stamp says “Our theory also predicted that we could suppress the decoherence, and push the decoherence rate in the experiment to levels far below the threshold necessary for quantum information processing, by applying high magnetic fields.”
In the experiment, California researchers prepared a crystalline array of Iron-8 molecules in a quantum superposition, where the net magnetization of each molecule was simultaneously oriented up and down. The decay of this superposition by decoherence was then observed in time – and the decay was spectacularly slow, behaving exactly as the UBC researchers predicted.
The results have been presented the July 20, 2011 issue of Nature
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