Scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have cracked a major hurdle in quantum computing: they got atomic nuclei to “talk” to each other inside silicon chips, paving the way for practical, scalable quantum computers.
This breakthrough lets researchers create quantum entanglement—where particles link up so tightly that what happens to one instantly affects the other, no matter the distance. It’s the secret sauce that makes quantum computers way faster than today’s regular machines for solving complex problems.
The team achieved this by linking the spins of two atomic nuclei through electrons, all at the tiny scales used in modern computer chips. Their work appeared in the journal Science on September 18, marking a big step toward turning quantum tech into everyday reality.
Lead researcher Dr. Holly Stemp, now at MIT after doing this at UNSW, called it a game-changer. “We succeeded in making the cleanest, most isolated quantum objects talk to each other, at the scale where standard silicon electronic devices are fabricated today,” she said. This means future quantum microchips could use the same manufacturing tricks that build your phone or laptop.
Quantum computing faces a tough balancing act: keep the delicate quantum bits (qubits) shielded from noise and interference to avoid errors, but still let them interact for real computations. Many setups excel at one or the other, but scaling up to a full quantum processor has been tricky.
UNSW’s approach uses the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms embedded in silicon—the same material powering current electronics. “The spin of an atomic nucleus is the cleanest, most isolated quantum object in the solid state,” explained Scientia Professor Andrea Morello from UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications.
Over 15 years, Morello’s group has pushed this silicon-based tech forward, holding quantum info for over 30 seconds (a lifetime in quantum terms) and running operations with error rates under 1%. They were the first to do this in silicon devices. But connecting multiple nuclei was the sticking point—their isolation made linking them hard.
Before, nuclei had to huddle close under one shared electron to chat. Electrons can spread out like a cloud, touching multiple nuclei, but only so far, and controlling each one gets messy with a crowd.
Dr. Stemp used a fun metaphor: “Nuclei were like people in a sound-proof room—they can talk clearly if they’re all together, but no outsiders can join, and the room only fits so many. It doesn’t scale.”
Now, with this advance, it’s like handing out telephones. Electrons act as those lines, letting distant nuclei connect. Co-author Mark van Blankenstein added, “Two electrons can touch each other from afar, and if each links to a nucleus, the nuclei communicate through them.”
The nuclei in this experiment sat about 20 nanometers apart—tiny, but huge in quantum terms. As Stemp put it, “If we scaled each nucleus to person size, that distance would stretch from Sydney to Boston!” Crucially, 20 nanometers matches the precision of today’s silicon chip factories, used in everything from PCs to smartphones.
The team implanted the phosphorus atoms into ultra-pure silicon from collaborators at the University of Melbourne and Keio University in Japan. This compatibility sweeps away a key barrier to building large-scale silicon quantum computers based on atomic nuclei, bringing us closer to quantum tech that could revolutionize fields like drug discovery, cryptography, and AI.
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