Particle size movements occur very quickly, making it challenging to discern what’s going on within. Recently, engineers at the Universities of Regensburg and Michigan have created a device called an “attoclock” that can capture electron images at intervals as short as quintillionths of a second.
Clock speeds for modern computers are expressed in nanoseconds or billionths of a second. Even while that’s fast enough for the tasks we use for now, quantum computers have the ability to significantly accelerate tasks if the correct resources are first obtained.
The principal author of the study, Mackillo Kira, explained that the processor in your present computer functions at gigahertz, which is one billionth of a second every operation. Because electrons in a computer chip clash trillions of times per second to end the quantum computing cycle, which is incredibly sluggish in quantum computing. A billion-times-faster capture of that electron movement is what we’ve required to advance performance. And we now possess it.
One quintillionth of a second, or attoseconds, is the period on which the team’s new instrument measures data. The fact that there are more than twice as many attoseconds in a second than there are seconds in the universe’s entire existence serves to emphasize just how brief that timescale is.
Naturally, it would be difficult to record time increments this small, but the team has created a new technology that enables them to do so. Two light pulses with energies matching the electrons are used in this procedure. The first is an infrared light pulse that moves the electrons into a state that allows them to flow through a semiconductor material. Subsequently, a terahertz (THz) pulse of lesser intensity is applied, forcing the electrons to collide head-on by sending them on trajectories. This results in a light flash and features such as quantum interactions can be revealed by analyzing the exact timing of these flashes.
“We employed a pair of pulses: an initial pulse that matches the electron’s energy state, followed by a subsequent pulse that modifies the state,” Kira explained. “In essence, we can record the way these two pulses alter the quantum state of the electron and then plot that information against time.”
The researchers claim that by expanding our knowledge of the behavior, movement, and interaction of electrons in materials, devices such as these represent a first step towards more advanced quantum computers.
The study was released in the Nature Journal.
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