A new technique for creating NV-doped single-crystal nanodiamonds has been created by North Carolina State University researchers. These NV-doped nanodiamonds are only four to eight nanometers wide, meaning they could become the ideal components in room-temperature quantum computing technologies.
Normally, diamonds have specific crystalline structures that consist of repeated diamond tetrahedrons that each contain five carbon atoms. But the researchers were able to develop a technique for creating diamond tetrahedrons that have only two carbon atoms – one vacancy, where an atom is missing; one carbon-13 atom; and one nitrogen atom. This is called the NV center. Now, each NV-doped nanodiamond contains thousands of atoms but only one NV center; the remainder of the tetrahedrons in the nanodiamond are made solely of carbon.
“That little dot, the NV center, turns the nanodiamond into a qubit,” explains Professor Jay Narayan, lead author of the study. “Each NV center has two transitions: NV0 and NV-. We can go back and forth between these two states using electric current or laser. These nanodiamonds could serve as the basic building blocks of a quantum computer.”.
The new approach for creating NV-doped nanodiamonds reduces impurities, controls the size of the NV-doped nanodiamond, allows researchers to place the nanodiamonds with precision, and most importantly, incorporates carbon-13 into the material, which is essential for creating the entanglement required in quantum computing.
Source:
NC State News (https://news.ncsu.edu/2016/11/nanodiamonds-quantum-computing-2016/)
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