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).
Written by the HappyGood desk from the primary source linked above and checked against it. Every story links its source. Corrections: hello@happygood.news.
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