Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,900 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.
Magneto-sensitive fluorescent proteins
A team led by the University of Oxford engineered a class of biomolecules to respond differently to magnetic fields and radio waves when exposed to a certain wavelength of light. They explored a suite of sensing techniques based on these magneto-sensitive fluorescent proteins — including an approach to imaging, similar to MRI, capable of tracking specific molecules or gene expression within a living organism.
With last August’s fluorescent protein-based qubit from the University of Chicago, the frontier of exploiting proteins’ quantum-mechanical properties for new sensors and computing techniques is expanding rapidly.
This work was published this week in Nature.
Metasurface-based optical tweezers
A team at Columbia developed a neutral-atom array using metasurface-based optical tweezers. Built from silicon nitride and titanium dioxide, the metasurface allows the team to use a much more powerful laser to directly generate the optical tweezers without the additional equipment required in spatial light modulator systems or acousto-optic deflector systems.
The team successfully trapped 1,000 strontium atoms with their new technique.
“We are laying critical groundwork to enable quantum computers with more than 100,000 qubits,” according to Sebastian Will in an announcement from Columbia. “To trap a hundred thousand atoms, we’ll need a much more powerful laser than we currently have. But, it’s in a realistic range.”
This work was published in Nature.
Neutral-atom array. Image from Columbia University.
Cooling trapped-ion systems
MIT and Lincoln Laboratory researchers developed a photonic chip with antennas to manipulate beams of tightly focused, intersecting light, offering a faster and more energy-efficient method for cooling trapped-ion computing systems. They demonstrated ion cooling that was nearly 10 times below the limit of standard laser cooling. The chip reached this limit in about 100 microseconds, several times faster than other techniques, according to an MIT announcement.
Aspects of this work were published in Light: Science & Applications and Physical Review Letters earlier this month.
Quickbits
Quantum Campus is edited by Bill Bell, a science writer and marketing consultant who has covered physics and high-performance computing for more than 25 years. Disclosure statement.
