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.

Quasicrystals

Engineers at the University of Michigan developed a method for modeling quasicrystals, solids that are built from atoms that arrange themselves in a lattice without the lattice repeating. They recently published the first quantum-mechanical simulations of these quasicrystals. The simulations run up to 100 times faster than traditional approaches.

“We can now simulate…interfaces between different crystals, as well as crystal defects that can enable quantum computing bits,” Michigan’s Vikram Gavini said in an announcement.

This work was published in Nature Physics.

Superconducting rectifiers

MIT researchers introduced a superconducting diode bridge that operates at a few degrees Kelvin. The superconducting diodes that make up the bridge are fabricated from thin-film bilayers of vanadium and the insulating ferromagnet europium sulfide. Operating as rectifiers, the devices that can convert AC to DC.

The team believes the rectifiers would cut down on heat and noise and enable larger, more stable quantum systems, according to an announcement.

This work was published in Nature Electronics.

Quantum advantage

A team of scientists at Los Alamos National Lab showed quantum advantage in large Gaussian bosonic circuit problems, mapping them to a class of problems known as bounded-error quantum polynomial time complete problems. The team looked at an extremely complex optical circuit with beam splitters and phase shifters acting on an exponentially large number of light sources, as well as numerical simulations of an interferometer.

“Just writing down a complete description of this system on a classical computer would require an enormous amount of memory and processing capability,” Los Alamos’ Diego García-Martín said. “Our work also rigorously shows that this simulation problem is not expected to be solvable by a classical computer without running for an intractable amount of time. But with a quantum computer, we were able to simulate this problem efficiently.”

This work was published in Physical Review Letters.

Epitaxial strain

University of Minnesota researchers used hybrid molecular beam epitaxy to grow ultra-thin layers of ruthenium oxide, which is typically metallic but nonmagnetic. By applying epitaxial strain to these atomically thin layers, they were able to induce magnetic properties.

This precise control over the composition, thickness, and epitaxial strain is crucial for the development of functional materials for next-generation spintronics and quantum technologies, according to the team.

This work was published in PNAS.

Quickbits

• Nature to include referee reports and author responses in all published papers (Nature)

• Infleqtion ships 500-qubit neutral-atom system to Japan’s Institute for Molecular Science (Quantum Computing Report)

• $21 million gift establishes the Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine at the University of Chicago

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