Researchers from the University of New South Wales will next week unveil what they say is a major advance in the road to building super-fast quantum computers.
The advance, of which a patent has been sought to protect it, is considered by the UNSW researchers as a substantial step forward in the global race to make the first generation of quantum computers, and "likely clears the final hurdle in making them a reality", the UNSW researchers said.
"What we have is a game changer," Andrew Dzurak, scientia professor and director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW, said.
Dzurak, along with Professor Mark Hoffman, dean of the Faculty of Engineering at UNSW, Dr Menno Veldhorst, a UNSW research fellow, and Rosie Hicks, chief executive officer of UNSW's Australian National Fabrication Facility, will present their findings at a news conference to be held in Sydney on Tuesday to coincide with publication of their work in the global scientific journal, Nature.
UNSW is seen by many as a world leader in the quantum computing field, with the university's quantum computing star Michelle Simmons and a team of researchers developing the world's smallest working transistor built from a single atom and making a silicon wire a thousand times narrower than a human hair, an essential component of a future quantum computer.
The research was published in Nature Nanotechnology in 2012, 10 years ahead of predictions by global chip manufacturers.
As a physicist, Professor Simmons and her team harnessed the power of atoms to develop super-fast, super-small devices that can process huge amounts of data. The ultimate aim of researchers in this field is to develop a commercially-viable quantum supercomputer that can complete in days extraordinarily complex tasks which currently take decades.
In August last year, Simmons joined Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Alexander Graham Bell as an elected member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences society.
In August this year Professor Simmons, who is director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation at the University of NSW, won the CSIRO Eureka prize for scientific leadership.
with Heath Gilmore
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