Stanford physicists watch a single unit of sound disappear
A tiny mechanical resonator that vibrates like a tuning fork has given Stanford researchers a direct look at how sound disappears at the quantum scale. The team, led by physicist Amir Safavi-Naeini, watched the resonator lose a single phonon, the smallest discrete unit of sound, catching a quantum jump of sound directly for the first time. The findings appear in the journal Science. A phonon is the coordinated movement of a large group of atoms, the sound equivalent of a photon of light. A ringing bell seems to fade smoothly, but a resonator's vibrational energy actually changes in discrete steps, and those sudden transitions are the quantum jumps the team measured. Study co-first authors Takuma Makihara and Erik Szakiel built a way to connect the resonator to a superconducting qubit, an electrical circuit that can store quantum information and double as a detector able to check the resonator's energy state repeatedly without disturbing it. 'We had to continually develop new processes to make this extremely long-lived, vibrating object and then integrate it with the qubit, which is our little electrical detector, without ruining either subsystem,' said Makihara, a recent Stanford doctoral graduate. The resonator could keep ringing for two milliseconds, giving the detector enough time to work. In many proposed quantum computing designs, a quantum jump signals an error, and pinpointing when those jumps happen has been difficult. Tracking them in sound is a step toward catching such errors during a calculation.
Quantum computers can develop errors in their fragile quantum states before a calculation finishes. A method for catching the exact moment a quantum jump occurs gives researchers a way to spot those errors as they happen.
Source: Scientists Just Watched a Single Quantum of Sound Vanish for the First Time (scitechdaily.com). Spotted via Science Daily.
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