News

Nano-diamonds color road to quantum computer

Media Release, Monday 1 December 2003

With a hint of alchemy, University of Melbourne scientists have shot carbon atoms into glass and by adding a bit of heat, turned them into nanometre-sized diamonds with properties that could create help create a quantum computer.

Professor Steven Prawer and a team from the University’s Department of Physics have managed to manufacture these nano-diamonds using nothing more than a common furnace and they are now working to exploit a unique property of these nano-diamonds to create a quantum computer.

Quantum computers are expected to far surpass the capabilities of today’s most powerful supercomputers.

Professor Prawer will present his research tomorrow (Tuesday 2 December) at The Sir Mark Oliphant Conference “Scaling Down to a Nano-Materials World".

The conference takes place at the University of Melbourne's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from December 1-4 and has attracted some of the world’s leading scientists in nanotechnology to reveal and explore the spectacular advances of one of the emerging supersciences of the 21st Century.

Pure diamonds contain only carbon atoms and are transparent. Any impurities will usually give them a variety of color states. The impurity in Professor Prawer’s nano-diamonds is a single nitrogen atom that has kicked out one of the carbon atoms.

The nitrogen atom creates what is known as the color centre, or NV centre (Nitrogen Vacancy centre) in a diamond. This centre has a spare electron hanging around that can be in either an ‘excited’ or ‘ground’ (unexcited) state. Researchers at the Australian National University have shown this excited state has the potential to work in the same way as a 1 and 0 does in the binary system of programming in today’s computers.

Professor Prawer is now working to create arrays of these nano-diamonds with single NV-centres. Arrays will allow them to scale up the computing power of any quantum computer giving it enormous potential to advance areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data mining.

The Sir Mark Oliphant Conferences are sponsored by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training to commemorate the centenary of the birth of the distinguished Australian physicist Sir Mark Oliphant, a Foundation Fellow of both the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) who run the series.