Quantum computing has been called the
space race of the 21st century.
It's impact is so profound and it's
realization so challenging that only a
large collaboration of the best
researchers in the world can hope to
achieve this goal. Now, thanks to the
next-generation technologies fund from
the Department of Defence, a consortium
of three Australian institutions:
Griffith University,
UNSW Sydney and University of Technology
Sydney, in partnership with seven leading
American universities and research labs,
has set out to develop an unprecedented
capability, a noise-canceling system for
quantum computers. The information
process by a quantum computer is
extremely fragile. Protecting it from the
noise in the environment is absolutely
essential for the quantum computer to
work. Imagine you are in a noisy
environment, like the back of this
quantum engineering laboratory and you
want to take a phone call or listen to
music you're gonna need some noise
cancelling headphones. Now, we want to do the same thing but instead of protecting
our ears we want to protect the quantum
bits inside the quantum computer chip.
To build a noise cancelling system you need three things: a microphone to measure the
noise, a speaker to cancel it and a
cloud computer program that actually
tells a speaker what to do. What makes
this problem complicated for us is that
a quantum system is very sensitive to
all sorts of noise, not just vibrations,
so for example, electromagnetic fields or
even the presence of other quantum
systems. Here at Griffith we developed a
protocol allowing us to characterize all
the noises that affect a quantum system.
At UTS, we use state of the art machinery
and artificial intelligence to
define in real time what signals to
apply to cancel this noise. The physical
hardware we will use is made of two
different atoms implanted side-by-side
inside a silicon quantum computer chip.
The bigger atom is more sensitive to the
noise and acts as the microphone. We
analyze the noise it picks up and then
with our quantum machine learning
algorithms we adapt the electromagnetic
fields applied to the smaller atom
that carries the quantum information. The result is that the data qubit receives
only the desired signals that are used
to encode the quantum information while
the noise is canceled out. This project
will develop a crucial capability for
making quantum computers work reliably. It will also help us create some of the
most advanced machine learning and
artificial intelligence protocols. This
major breakthrough for quantum computing
will have applications in many other
fields of technology development, defence and data analytics.
