Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award for Ben Murdin

Thursday 18 October 2012

Nobel laureates Haroche and Wineland pioneered quantum computing in atoms and ions suspended in empty vacuum. They developed techniques for putting each atom into a state of oscillating at two different frequencies at once, like a chord on a guitar string. Erwin Schrodinger, one of the fathers of quantum physics speculated that this weird behavior might eventually enable construction of a machine that could one day be capable of making a large every-day object do two jobs at once.

Using very similar optical techniques to Haroche and Wineland, Ben and his team succeeded in putting phosphorus atoms into chord-like states that are simultaneously oscillating and not oscillating at the same time. Ben says “the shocking thing for us was that the surrounding silicon did not disturb the delicate chord-like state of the phosphorus atoms much. The phosphorus atom is almost as big as a transistor in an ordinary silicon computer chip, so it is in contact with about a million other electrons from the silicon. When we started we thought that this would mean the weird wave-like motion of the phosphorus would instantly collapse giving us back the ordinary one-place-at-a-time particle motion. It turns out that there is plenty of time to do a computer operation, and we are now working on trying to replicate this with a single phosphorus atom rather than a big bunch of them.”