MIT AI Hardware Program

Engineers Discover a New Way to Control Atomic Nuclei as “Qubits”

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office

Using lasers, researchers can directly control a property of nuclei called spin, that can encode quantum information.

Against a pink background, a blue and red laser beam shoot down from the top as wavey arrows. They point to a beige atomic nucleus with a gauge needle in the center pointing left, signifying spin direction.

February 15, 2023

In principle, quantum-based devices such as computers and sensors could vastly outperform conventional digital technologies for carrying out many complex tasks. But developing such devices in practice has been a challenging problem despite great investments by tech companies as well as academic and government labs.

Today’s biggest quantum computers still only have a few hundred “qubits,” the quantum equivalents of digital bits.

Now, researchers at MIT have proposed a new approach to making qubits and controlling them to read and write data. The method, which is theoretical at this stage, is based on measuring and controlling the spins of atomic nuclei, using beams of light from two lasers of slightly different colors. The findings are described in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Physical Review X, written by MIT doctoral student Haowei Xu, professors Ju Li and Paola Cappellaro, and four others.

Complete article from MIT News.

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