Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,500 researchers, we publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from across the country. Want to see your work featured? Submit your ideas to the editor.

Naturally occurring p-n junctions

While studying the topological material MnBi₆Te₁₀ and introducing antimony, a group of physicists and engineers unexpectedly discovered naturally occurring regions that act like p-n junctions, a type of semiconductor junction that contains internal electric fields and is widely used in microelectronics. The new junctions are highly responsive to light and could be used in spintronics and other quantum applications, according to an announcement. 

The team includes members from the University of Chicago and Penn State.

“In an ideal quantum material, you want a really uniform distribution of charges,” said UChicago graduate student Khanh Duy Nguyen. “Seeing this uneven distribution suggests that we may not enable quantum applications in the originally planned fashion, but reveals this other really useful phenomenon.”

This work was published in Nanoscale.

Hard X-ray pulses

An international collaboration led by the University of Wisconsin Madison generated the shortest hard X-ray pulses ever produced. The pulses are shorter than 100 attoseconds and show spatial inhomogeneities and spectral splitting, inhomogeneities, and broadening. These properties provide opportunities for quantum X-ray optics applications, according to the team.

This work was published in Nature.

Random number factory

NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder released the Colorado University Randomness Beacon. CURBy produces and broadcasts random numbers daily through a website. The numbers are generated by an entanglement-derived protocol that extracts randomness from unpredictable non-local quantum correlations. It uses distributed intertwined hash chains to cryptographically trace and verify the extraction process. This protocol forms the basis for a public traceable and certifiable quantum randomness beacon.

“If God does play dice with the universe, then you can turn that into the best random number generator that the universe allows,” NIST’s Krister Shalm said. “We really wanted to take that experiment out of the lab and turn it into a useful public service.”

This work was published in Nature.

Quantum Starling

IBM announced plans for a large-scale quantum computer capable of running quantum circuits comprising 100 million quantum gates on 200 logical qubits. They also shared an end-to-end framework for a fault-tolerant computing on the system. Called Quantum Starling, the system is modular and based on the bivariate bicycle codes that were first published by the company in Nature last year.

IBM claims the system will be complete by 2029.

With the announcement, the company released an updated quantum roadmap and a paper detailing what they call “the first-ever accurate, fast, compact, and flexible error correction decoder.”

Quickbits

• Colorado’s quantum Tech Hub partners with IBM on training

• Symmetry-protected electronic metastability in an optically driven cuprate ladder (Nature Materials)

• Single-qubit gates with errors at the 10⁻⁷ level (PRL)

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