According to the research paper "Coherent control of Rydberg state in silicon"  that appears in the current Nature,  scientists have created a simple version of Schrodinger’s cat  (right) –  paradoxically simultaneously both dead and alive - in the traditional silicon out of which ordinary computer chips are made.


Carl Pidgeon, Professor of semiconductor physics at Heriot-Watt (left) is also coordinator of the EPSRC/FOM laser science programme at the Dutch Free Electron Laser (right) and has been working on direct observation  of the LO phonon bottleneck in wide GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells ... "The dependence of lifetime on the details of the quantum well structures opens up the possibility of lifetime design for far infrared semiconductor lasers and work extended to first observations of lifetimes and design for inter-subband transitions in Si/SiGe QW."

"This is a real breakthrough for modern electronics and has huge potential for the future,"  explains Professor Ben Murdin, (left) Photonics Group leader at the University of Surrey. "Lasers have had an ever increasing impact on technology, especially for the transmission of processed information between computers, and this development illustrates their potential power for processing information inside the computer itself, "

"In our case we used a far-infrared, very short, high intensity pulse from the Dutch FELIX laser   to put an electron orbiting within silicon into two states at once - a so-called quantum superposition state.

"We then demonstrated that the superposition state could be controlled so that the electrons emit a burst of light at a well-defined time after the superposition was created. The burst of light is a photon echo; and its observation proves we have full control over the quantum state of the atoms."

The development of a silicon based "quantum computer" may be only just over the horizon. "Quantum computers can solve some problems much more efficiently than conventional computers - and they will be particularly useful for security because they can quickly crack existing codes and create un-crackable codes," Professor Murdin continued.

"Next generation of devices must make use of these superpositions to do quantum computations. Crucially our work shows that some of the quantum engineering already demonstrated by atomic physicists in very sophisticated instruments called cold atom traps, can be implemented in the type of silicon chip used in making the much more common transistor."

Professor Gabriel Aeppli,director (left) of the London Centre for Nanotechnology adds the findings were highly significant to business and academia alike. "Next to iron and ice, silicon is the most important inorganic crystalline solid because of our tremendous ability to control electrical conduction via chemical and electrical means," he says. "Our work adds control of quantum superpositions to the silicon toolbox."