Just as ordinary matter can be in a solid, liquid, gas, or superheated plasmic phase (or state), quantum materials also have phases. The phase refers to how the matter is structured on an atomic level — the arrangement of its atoms or its electrons, for example. Several years ago, physicists discovered a quantum supersolid, and last year, a team confirmed the existence of quantum spin liquids, a long-suspected phase of quantum matter, in a simulator. The recent team thinks they've discovered another new phase.
Quantum bits, or qubits, are like ordinary computer bits in that their values can be 0 or 1, but they can also be 0 or 1 simultaneously, a state of ambiguity that allows the computers to consider many possible solutions to a problem much faster than an ordinary computer. Quantum computers should eventually be able to solve problems that classical computers can't.
Qubits are often atoms; in the recent case, the researchers used 10 ytterbium ions, which were controlled by electric fields and manipulated using laser pulses. When multiple qubits' states can be described in relation to one another, the qubits are considered entangled. Quantum entanglement is a delicate agreement between multiple qubits in a system, and the agreement is dissolved the moment any one of those bits' values is certain. At that moment, the system decoheres, and the quantum operation falls apart.
A big challenge of quantum computing is maintaining the quantum state of qubits. The slightest fluctuations in temperature, vibrations, or electromagnetic fields can cause the supersensitive qubits to decohere and their calculations to fall apart. Since the longer the qubits stay quantum, the more you can get done, making computers' quantum states persist for as long as possible is a crucial step for the field.
In the recent research, pulsing a laser periodically at the 10 ytterbium qubits kept them in a quantum state — meaning entangled — for 1.5 seconds. But when the researchers pulsed the lasers in the pattern of the Fibonacci sequence, they found that the qubits on the edge of the system remained in a quantum state for about 5.5 seconds, the entire length of the experiment (the qubits could have remained in a quantum state for longer, but the team ended the experiment at the 5.5-second mark). Their research was published this summer in Nature.
You can think of the Fibonacci sequence laser pulses as two frequencies that never overlap. That makes the pulses a quasicrystal: a pattern that has order, but no periodicity....<<<Read More>>>...