A blog by the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter @ Caltech
Posted on by Nicole Yunger HalpernThe most steampunk qubit
The most steampunk qubit
I never imagined that an artist would update me about quantum-computing research.
Last year, steampunk artist Bruce Rosenbaum forwarded me a notification about a news article published in Science. The article reported on an experiment performed in physicist Yiwen Chu’s lab at ETH Zürich. The experimentalists had built a “mechanical qubit”: they’d stored a basic unit of quantum information in a mechanical device that vibrates like a drumhead. The article dubbed the device a “steampunk qubit.”
I was collaborating with Bruce on a quantum-steampunk sculpture, and he asked if we should incorporate the qubit into the design. Leave it for a later project, I advised. But why on God’s green Earth are you receiving email updates about quantum computing?
My news feed sends me everything that says “steampunk,” he explained. So keeping a bead on steampunk can keep one up to date on quantum science and technology—as I’ve been preaching for years.
Other ideas displaced Chu’s qubit in my mind until I visited the University of California, Berkeley this January. Visiting Berkeley in January, one can’t help noticing—perhaps with a trace of smugness—the discrepancy between the temperature there and the temperature at home. And how better to celebrate a temperature difference than by studying a quantum-thermodynamics-style throwback to the 1800s?
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