Quantum Bling — AWS Partners With De Beers Group for New Synthetic Diamond Material

Insider Summary

• AWS will work with Element Sixpart of the De Beers Group, in a research project to be developed new synthetic diamond material.
• Diamond has both optical and quantum properties that make it uniquely promising for several AWS focus areas, including semiconductors, quantum networks, and quantum communications applications
• Figure: These NV (left) and SiV (right) diagrams show their atomic configurations in the diamond lattice. In each case the carbon atoms (silver) are replaced by vacancies (white with black outline) and deformed atoms (Nitrogen is brown, Silicon is gold). Source: AWS Center for Quantum Networks.

AWS announced research collaboration with Element Sixpart of the De Beers Group, to grow new synthetic diamond material.

It may not seem like an uncommon pairing of companies — and it may sound like they don’t have a quantum connection — but the partnership makes a lot of sense, according to a company statement. Diamond has both optical and quantum properties that make it uniquely promising for several AWS focus areas, including semiconductors, quantum networks, and quantum communications applications, among other important uses.

in a AWS blog postBart Machielse, of AWS and Daniel Twitchen, Element Six, break down specifically why diamonds are the quantum network’s best friend.

They write: “The core element of a quantum repeater is a memory qubit that interacts with light. This qubit captures information encoded in light, stores it, and, together with other nearby qubits, performs error correction to eliminate errors that may occur during communication. To be feasible, these memory qubits must have reliable interactions with light in the visible or telecommunications domains (excluding many prominent qubit candidates from quantum computation, such as superconducting qubits) and should be feasible for mass production. This requirement makes deformed qubits, like the color centers in diamonds, leading candidates as quantum repeating memories.”

As well as being rather expensive, natural diamonds have some problems serving their role in quantum networks. The researchers explain that in natural diamonds the undesirable number of defective atoms reduces the coherence, optical, and spin properties of color centers such as the Nitrogen-Vacancy Center (NV) and Silicon-Vacancy Center (SiV), two classes of diamond-defective qubits that have emerged as leading candidates. for communication applications.

Synthetic diamonds can help, they added.

“Fortunately, the advent of synthetic diamond growth has made it possible to reduce these unwanted imperfections. Advances in plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) over the past 20 years have made it possible to grow individual diamond plates of sufficient purity and regularity for quantum applications. The growth of PECVD allows the formation of diamonds hundreds or thousands of times purer than the Regent Diamond, the famous pure natural diamond on display at the Louvre. In the best PECVD diamonds, less than one in a million atoms is an impurity – compared to one in a thousand for most natural diamonds.”

For more information, you can read full AWS post.