Element Six and Harvard University Collaboration on Nano-Engineered Synthetic Diamond Sets a New Quantum Information Record

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, June 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ –

Element Six, the world leader in synthetic diamond supermaterials, working in
partnership with academics in Harvard University, California Institute of Technology and
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Quantenoptik, has used its Element Six single crystal synthetic
diamond grown by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) to demonstrate the capability of quantum
bit memory to exceed one second at room temperature.

(Photo:
http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120608/537611 )

This study demonstrated the ability of synthetic diamond to provide the read-out of a
quantum bit which had preserved its spin polarisation for several minutes and its memory
coherence for over a second. This is the first time that such long memory times have been
reported for a material at room temperature, giving synthetic diamond a significant
advantage over rival materials and technologies that require complex infrastructure which
necessitates, for example, cryogenic cooling.

The versatility, robustness, and potential scalability of this synthetic diamond
system may allow for new applications in quantum information science and quantum based
sensors used, for example, in nano-scale imaging of chemical/biological processes.

The synthetic diamond technical work was completed by the Element Six synthetic
diamond R&D team based at Ascot in the UK who developed novel processes for growing
synthetic diamond using chemical vapour deposition (CVD) techniques. Steve Coe, Element
Six Group Innovation Director, explained the success of the collaboration:

“The field of synthetic diamond science is moving very quickly and is requiring
Element Six to develop synthesis processes with impurity control at the level of parts per
trillion – real nano-engineering control of CVD diamond synthesis. We have been working
closely with Professor Lukin’s team in Harvard for three years – this result published in
Science is an example of how successful this collaboration has been.”

Professor Mikhail Lukin of Harvard University’s Department of Physics described the
significance of the research findings:

“Element Six’s unique and engineered synthetic diamond material has been at the heart
of these important developments. The demonstration of a single qubit quantum memory with
seconds of storage time at room temperature is a very exciting development, which combines
the four key requirements of initialisation, memory, control and measurement. These
findings might one day lead to novel quantum communication and computation technologies,
but in the nearer term may enable a range of novel and disruptive quantum sensor
technologies, such as those being targeted to image magnetic fields on the nano-scale for
use in imaging chemical and biological processes.”

The findings represent the latest developments in quantum information processing,
which involves manipulating individual atomic sized impurities in synthetic diamond and
exploiting the quantum property spin of an individual electron, which can be thought of
classically as a bar magnet having two states: up (1) and down (0). However, in the
quantum mechanical description (physics of the very small), this quantum spin (qubit) can
be both 0 and 1 simultaneously. It is this property that provides a framework for quantum
computing, but also for more immediate applications such as novel magnetic sensing
technologies.

Notes to Editors:

About Element Six
Element Six (http://www.e6.com) is an independently managed synthetic diamond
supermaterials company. Element Six is part of the De Beers Family of Companies and is
co-owned by Umicore, the Belgian materials group. Element Six is a global leader in the
design, development and production of synthetic diamond supermaterials, and operates
worldwide with its head office registered in Luxembourg, and primary manufacturing
facilities in China, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, South Africa and the UK.

The quantum information research collaboration

The study was a collaboration between the following organisations:

        - Element Six, Ascot, UK,
        - Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
        - Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of
          Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA.
        - Max-Planck-Institut fuer Quantenoptik, Garching, Germany.
        - School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA,
          USA

Funding for some of this research was provided by the DARPA QuASAR programme. The
results of the research appear in an article in Science magazine, published 8 June 2012.

For further technical details of the research, please see the full press release
posted on the Element Six website:

http://www.e6.com/wps/wcm/connect/e6_content_en/home/about+us/news/news+2012/element+six+and+harvard+university+collaboration+on+nano-engineered+synthetic+diamond+sets+a+new+quantum+information+record

    Photo: 

http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120608/537611

SOURCE Element Six