Engineers develop room temperature, two-

dimensional platform for quantum

technology
11 February 2019

Fellow Bassett Lab members David Hopper and Raj

Patel, along with Marcus Doherty of the Australian
National University, also contributed to the study.

It was published in the journal Nature

Communications, where it was selected as an
Editor's Highlight.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's School There are number of potential architectures for
of Engineering and Applied Science have now building quantum technology. One promising
demonstrated a new hardware platform based on system involves electron spins in diamonds: these
isolated electron spins in a two-dimensional material. spins are also trapped at defects in diamond's
The electrons are trapped by defects in sheets of regular crystalline pattern where carbon atoms are
hexagonal boron nitride, a one-atom-thick missing or replaced by other elements. The defects
semiconductor material, and the researchers were able act like isolated atoms or molecules, and they
to optically detect the system's quantum states. Credit:
interact with light in a way that enables their spin to
Ann Sizemore Blevins
be measured and used as a qubit.

These systems are attractive for quantum

technology because they can operate at room
Quantum computers promise to be a revolutionary
temperatures, unlike other prototypes based on
technology because their elementary building
ultra-cold superconductors or ions trapped in
blocks, qubits, can hold more information than the
vacuum, but working with bulk diamond presents its
binary, 0-or-1 bits of classical computers. But to
own challenges.
harness this capability, hardware must be
developed that can access, measure and
"One disadvantage of using spins in 3-D materials
manipulate individual quantum states.
is that we can't control exactly where they are
relative to the surface" Bassett says. "Having that
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's
level of atomic scale control is one reason to work
School of Engineering and Applied Science have
in 2-D. Maybe you want to place one spin here and
now demonstrated a new hardware platform based
one spin there and have them talk them to each
on isolated electron spins in a two-dimensional
other. Or if you want to have a spin in a layer of one
material. The electrons are trapped by defects in
material and plop a 2-D magnet layer on top and
sheets of hexagonal boron nitride, a one-atom-
have them interact. When the spins are confined to
thick semiconductor material, and the researchers
a single atomic plane, you enable a host of new
were able to optically detect the system's quantum
functionalities."
states.
With nanotechnological advances producing an
The study was led by Lee Bassett, assistant
expanding library of 2-D materials to choose from,
professor in the Department of Electrical and
Bassett and his colleagues sought the one that
Systems Engineering, and Annemarie Exarhos,
would be most like a flat analog of bulk diamond.
then a postdoctoral researcher in his lab.

1/3
"You might think the analog would be graphene, assembled into a crystal. In contrast, 2-D quantum
which is just a honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms, sensors could measure the structure and internal
but here we care more about the electronic dynamics of individual molecules, for example to
properties of the crystal than what type of atoms it's study chemical reactions and protein folding.
made of," says Exarhos, who is now an assistant
professor of Physics at Lafayette University. While the researchers conducted an extensive
"Graphene behaves like a metal, whereas diamond survey of h-BN defects to discover ones that have
is a wide-bandgap semiconductor and thus acts like special spin-dependent optical properties, the exact
an insulator. Hexagonal boron nitride, on the other nature of those defects is still unknown. Next steps
hand, has the same honeycomb structure as for the team include understanding what makes
graphene, but, like diamond, it is also a wide- some, but not all, defects responsive to magnetic
bandgap semiconductor and is already widely used fields, and then recreating those useful defects.
as a dielectric layer in 2-D electronics."
Some of that work will be enabled by Penn's Singh
With hexagonal boron nitride, or h-BN, widely Center for Nanotechnology and its new JEOL
available and well characterized, Bassett and his NEOARM microscope. The only transmission
colleagues focused on one of its less well- electron microscope of its kind in the United States,
understood aspects: defects in its honeycomb the NEOARM is capable of resolving single atoms
lattice that can emit light. and potentially even creating the kinds of defects
the researchers want to work with.
That the average piece of h-BN contains defects
that emit light had previously been known. Bassett's "This study is bringing together two major areas of
group is the first to show that, for some of those scientific research," Bassett says. "On one hand,
defects, the intensity of the emitted light changes in there's been a tremendous amount of work in
response to a magnetic field. expanding the library of 2-D materials and
understanding the physics that they exhibit and the
"We shine light of one color on the material and we devices they can make. On the other hand, there's
get photons of another color back," Bassett says. the development of these different quantum
"The magnet controls the spin and the spin controls architectures. And this is one of the first to bring
the number of photons that the defects in the h-BN them together to say 'here's a potentially room-
emit. That's a signal that you can potentially use as temperature quantum architecture in a 2-D
a qubit." material.'"

Beyond computation, having the building block of a More information: Annemarie L. Exarhos et al,
quantum machine's qubits on a 2-D surface Magnetic-field-dependent quantum emission in
enables other potential applications that depend on hexagonal boron nitride at room temperature,
proximity. Nature Communications (2019). DOI:
10.1038/s41467-018-08185-8
"Quantum systems are super sensitive to their
environments, which is why they're so hard to
isolate and control," Bassett says. "But the flip side
is that you can use that sensitivity to make new Provided by University of Pennsylvania
types of sensors. In principle, these little spins can
be miniature nuclear magnetic resonance
detectors, like the kind used in MRIs, but with the
ability to operate on a single molecule.

Nuclear magnetic resonance is currently used to

learn about molecular structure, but it requires
millions or billions of the target molecule to be

2/3
 APA citation: Engineers develop room temperature, two-dimensional platform for quantum technology
(2019, February 11) retrieved 14 February 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-02-room-temperature-
two-dimensional-platform-quantum.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

3/3

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)