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Phonons are the smallest quantum units that make up sound, and like photons and other particles, they follow the rules of quantum mechanics. Researchers believe that phonon-based quantum computer chips can be designed to be the same size as ordinary chips, which opens a new door for the future development of quantum computers.

(by Chen Qiang / tr. by Robert Taylor)

When you turn on a light to illuminate a room, you experience a beam of light made up of countless photons. Photons are the particles that make up light. They are tiny, discrete quantum packets of energy. Photons follow the strange laws of quantum mechanics. For example, these laws stipulate that photons are inseparable, but allow photons to appear in multiple places at the same time.

Like the photons that make up light, the indivisible particles that make up sound are called phonons. Phonons are essentially the collective motion of trillions of atoms, just like the "crowd wave" carried out by thousands of spectators on the playground. When you listen to a song, what you hear is actually a stream of particles made up of phonons.

Like photons, phonons follow the same rules of quantum mechanics. However, the research on phonons is still in its infancy. Recently, researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago have created a device that produces a single phonon at a time. The device is the size of a chip and is made of a perfectly conductive material and is placed in a cryogenic environment. With this device, researchers can explore the quantum properties of phonons.

Using beam splitters to "split" phonons is like mirrors that reflect beams, and the researchers use "mirrors" that reflect beams to explore the quantum properties of phonons. In a recent experiment, they used a "semi-transparent" acoustic mirror called a "beam splitter". This kind of sound mirror will reflect half of the sound and let the other half's voice pass through. The researchers decided to test what happens when a phonon is aimed at the beam splitter.

Because phonons are inseparable. After interacting with the beam splitter, the phonon will eventually enter the so-called "superposition state". At this time, the phonon is in two states at the same time: while it is reflected by the beam splitter, it is also transmitted from the beam splitter. If you want to use a detector to intervene and detect the phonon, then the superposition state of the phonon will "collapse" and its state will become one of them: there is a 50-50 chance that you will detect that it is reflected by the beam splitter. there's a 50-50 chance you'll detect it passing through the beam splitter. The detection leads to the collapse of the superposition state. If there is no detection process, the phonon will remain in the superposition state of reflection and transmission at the same time.

Photons also have this superposition state, and scientists have detected this phenomenon decades ago. Now, the above experiments show that phonons have the same quantum properties.

With phonons entangled after proving that phonons can enter superposition states like photons, the researchers posed a more complex question. They want to know what happens if two identical phonons are sent to the beam splitter in two different directions.

Experiments show that each phonon will enter the superposition state. But if the emission time of the two phonons is precisely adjusted so that they interfere with each other, the result sent to the beam splitter is that the superposition states of the two phonons merge together to form a single superposition state: the two phonons are reflected together and transmitted together.

In fact, the two phonons are in a state of quantum entanglement and can influence each other in an instant. This means that detecting whether one phonon is reflected or transmitted will immediately force the other phonon into the same state.

So, if you detect it, you will always detect two phonons, either reflected or transmitted, and one will never be reflected and the other transmitted. The same effect occurs when two identical photons are sent to the beam splitter, known as the Hong-Euro-Mandel effect (Hong-Ou-Mandel effect), named after the surnames of three physicists who first predicted and observed the effect in 1987. Now, researchers have also demonstrated this effect with phonons.

With the emergence of a new type of quantum computer, these results show that phonons have the same quantum properties as photons and can enter the state of quantum entanglement. Researchers believe that we can use phonons to build a new type of quantum computer. Now, people have been using photons to build quantum computers. These quantum computers use a large number of entangled photons to solve many problems that can not be solved by traditional computers, such as prime factorization of large numbers or simulation of quantum systems.

Researchers believe that compared with the current traditional quantum computers, phonon-based quantum computers can be designed to be very compact. If phonon technology can be further extended and improved, phonon-based quantum computer chips can be designed to be the same size as ordinary chips, making them more practical.

Because many quantum objects can also interact with phonons, phonon-based quantum computers can also be combined with traditional quantum computers. The researchers speculate that the combined quantum computer may have more unique computing power.

References:

Https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adg8715

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