New ultra-sensitive quantum amplifiers that improve data and qubit transmission in the computers of the future. These include “the world’s most powerful computer”, which will be built at Fermilab in Chicago, USA. This is what will be developed by the researchers of the Cryogenics Laboratory at the University of Milano-Bicocca’s “Giuseppe Occhialini” Physics Department.
The project is called “Dart Wars”, is coordinated by Andrea Giachero, a researcher in Nuclear and Subnuclear Physics at the Milanese university, and has been selected by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) as part of the competitive call for the “Development of quantum technologies for the fields of physics of interest to INFN".
The three-year research project has a budget of around 1 million euros, funded by INFN, and involves, in addition to the Milano-Bicocca INFN division, the Lecce divisions, the Salerno group linked to the Naples division, the National Laboratory of Frascati and TIFPA in Trento. Giachero will coordinate a team of young researchers from Milano-Bicocca, using the sophisticated equipment in the Cryogenics Laboratory. Partners include INRIM (Italian National Institute for Metrological Research) and the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento.
“Dart Wars” (Detector Array Readout with Traveling Wave AmplifieRS) aims to develop innovative ultra-sensitive and super-conductive parametric “travelling wave” amplifiers that can improve the reading efficiency of data produced by quantum devices, such as quantum bits (qubits), and to study their application in quantum computers, the next generation of computers.
“Amplifiers that are currently in use cause an additional electronic noise,” explains Giachero, “due to the thermal agitation of the electrons, which alters detection of the – extremely weak – quantum signal that they measure, impeding correct coding. The ‘Dart Wars’ amplifiers, based on superconductors, will maintain the same high degree of sensitivity, producing an electronic noise at the lowest possible level in nature, the so-called quantum noise. Without impairing the coded information.” Their application will not be limited to quantum computers, but will also cover signals produced by low-temperature particle detectors used in fundamental physics experiments.
The activities that will be developed within the “Dart Wars” project are strongly connected to the American “SQMS” (Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center) project led by Italian Anna Grassellino at Fermilab in Chicago, which recently received 115 million dollars in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy in order to develop, within five years, a cutting-edge quantum computer boasting performance and processing speed that has never been achieved before. Giachero is part of the Italian team of INFN that will collaborate with Fermilab.
“Quantum technology is a strategic and rapidly evolving sector,” concludes the researcher, “which could have repercussions in many fields, from economics to aerospace engineering, cryptography and the military industry. We are at the start of the quantum computer era, just as we witnessed the dawn of the classic computer back in the 1950s. This time our university can also play its part and it intends to do so.”