Widely used in specialized electronics goods such as LEDs and electric vehicles, silicon carbide boasts versatility, wide commercial availability and growing use in high-power electronics, making it an attractive material for quantum information science, whose impact is expected to be profound. Drawing on physics at the atomic scale, technologies such as quantum computers, networks and sensors will likely revolutionize areas as varied as communication, drug development and logistics in the coming decades.
Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories and partner institutions have carried out a comprehensive study on the creation of qubits — the fundamental units of quantum information processing — in silicon carbide.
In a first-of-its-kind study, the Argonne and Sandia scientists harnessed cutting-edge nanoscale research tools at the two labs and successfully demonstrated a method for implanting qubits in silicon carbide with extreme precision. They also carried out state-of-the-art analysis on how silicon carbide responds at the atomic scale to the qubits’ implantation.
Their high-precision investigations enable scientists to better engineer quantum devices for specific purposes, whether to design ultraprecise sensors or build an unhackable communication network.
The researchers’ work was published in the journal Nanotechnology ("Deterministic nanoscale quantum spin-defect implantation and diffraction strain imaging") and supported in part by Q-NEXT, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Argonne.
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