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A Circuit Board With Time Crystals May Deliver Error-Free Computing
Engineers are close to solving one of the toughest problems in machine operations.

BY DARREN ORFPUBLISHED: JUN 20, 2024 11:28 AM EDT
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Florencio Horcajo Alvarez//Getty Images
Arguably the greatest engineering challenge in quantum computing is addressing these systems’ predilection for errors.
Now, a new study from scientists from Australia and Poland says that creating a kind of quantum circuit board using time crystals could help overcome these challenges by spreading qubits and keeping them in motion.
This idea, known as “time-tronics,” could form the foundation of a more reliable quantum computer.
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Quantum computers, by just their name alone, scream “future”—but it’s a future that’s still likely many more decades away. That’s because building one of these machines is a dizzying engineering headache that relies on superconductors, qubits (a quantum bit that’s in superposition so it’s both a “1” and “O”), and lots of other dizzying quantum weirdness. And to make matters worse, those qubits are also prone to errors. Lots and lots of errors.

That’s not necessarily the fault of the quantum computers, but the qubits themselves. Because when qubits interact to run calculations, they inherently degrade themselves, which in turn produces errors.

Now, a new study posted to the preprint server arXiv, by scientists in Australia and Poland, says that using time crystals as a kind of circuit board in next-gen quantum computers could make more reliable systems by “enabling quantum gate operations for all possible pairs of qubits,” according to the authors. Similar to electronics, they coined the term “time-tronics” to explain their new breakthrough.

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“The elements of these devices can correspond to structures of dimensions higher than three and can be arbitrarily connected and reconfigured at any moment,” the paper reads. “Our findings indicate that the limitations faced in building devices using conventional spatial crystals can be overcome by adopting crystalline structures in time.”

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Could These Crystals Help Us Travel Through Time?
Although it sounds like an unimaginative name for a fantasy film MacGuffin, time crystals are quantum phase of matter that aren’t really crystals—at least not how our three-dimensional minds think of them. While a spatial crystal has an intricate, repeating lattice of atoms, time crystals contain a periodic pattern of motion, which makes them a repeating lattice of time rather than space.

According to New Scientist, this particular composition is what makes time crystals a perfect candidate for a quantum computer circuit board because qubits would be “spread out and always in motion.” This makes interactions among qubits, including connections between distant qubits which is currently impossible in modern quantum computers, relatively easy and produce more reliable results.

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“As any connections between sites can be controlled, it is possible to realize a broad class of quantum devices,” the paper reads.

“We demonstrate that a temporal printed circuit board can host qubits, where all single-qubit operations can be realized and a controlled-Z gate can be performed between all possible qubit pairs, meeting the conditions for a universal quantum computer.”
Going forward, the team is focusing on creating time crystals using the Bose-Einstein condensate of Potassium-39, which was chosen for its ability for scientists to accurately tune interactions among atoms precisely. If it works, this breakthrough won’t revolutionize quantum computing overnight, but it could bring the field one big step closer to solving what’s been described as its most “defining challenge.”

time-tronics. Beam me up Doc!