Phonons on the chopping block: Are 'sound particles' quantum too?
Physicists thus wonder on the possibility of phonons to be used as qubits. Phonons are packets of vibrational energy.
Phonons on the chopping block: Are 'sound particles' quantum too?
Quantum computers and artificial intelligence are two of the emerging areas of interest in the realm of computing.
• Quibits- are the basic units of information used by quantum computers. A quibit can be a particle: like an electronic; a collection of particles; or a quantum system engineered to behave like a particle. The rules of quantum physics allows these bits to have the values "on" and "off" at the same time, unlike a regular computer.
• Quantum computers are, hence, able to perform complicated calculations that are out of reach of even supercomputers
• other forms of quantum computing use other units of information. For example, linear optical quantum computing (LOQC) uses photons, as quibits.
In fact, any particle that can be controlled and manipulated using quantum-mechanical phenomena, should, be usable as an information unit in a quantum computer.
• Physicists thus wonder on the possibility of phonons to be used as qubits. Phonons are packets of vibrational energy.
• while researchers can manipulate electrons using electric currents, magnetic field etc. and photons with mirrors, lenses etc. they need new tools to manipulate phonons. For this a new team have developed an acoustic beam-splitter.
• A beam-splitter, when placed in light's path, splits the beam (of photons) into two.
• although the new study showed that phonons behave like photons with a beam-splitter, it is still a long way before they can be used as units in quantum computers.