This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Creating a quantum device often begins by intentionally damaging a crystal. Scientists fire an ultrafast laser pulse into a material, knocking atoms out of place and leaving behind tiny imperfections called vacancies.
Far from being flaws, these vacancies can behave as qubits—the fundamental building blocks of quantum information. Researchers want to place these quantum defects exactly where they need them, but until now they have had only a limited understanding of what happens inside a crystal during the instant when a laser creates the defect. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have now taken an important step toward solving that problem.
Using the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility, the team developed a new X-ray imaging technique that lets them watch, in three dimensions and in real time, how silicon carbide responds immediately after an ultrafast laser pulse strikes it. Their work provides real-time pictures of how the laser's energy moves through the material—a key step toward building quantum devices with atomic precision. "Before you can precisely engineer quantum defects, you have to understand exactly what the laser is doing inside the material," said Argonne scientist Haidan Wen, an author of the paper.
"This technique lets us watch that process unfold, especially how atoms move in ways that weren't possible before." Drawing on the special features of quantum physics, quantum information technologies are expected to give us new ways to share information. They could speed drug discovery, help protect financial transactions and deliver solutions to currently intractable problems using quantum computation. The foundation of these technologies is the qubit.
Silicon carbide has emerged as one of the most promising qubit materials. It's capable of hosting atomic-scale defects whose quantum states can store and process information. And it is already widely used by the semiconductor industry, making it an attractive platform for manufacturing future quantum technologies at scale.
Scientists create the defects by striking the crystal with ultrafast laser pulses lasting only millionths of a billionth of a second. Compared with earlier methods that relied on electron or ion beams, lasers offer the possibility of creating vacancies at carefully chosen locations inside the crystal. But researchers have not fully understood exactly how the energy travels through the material before a vacancy forms.
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