Self-assembly advances development of quantum storage

MIT Technology Review : Practical quantum computing will require a way of storing and interacting with quantum data at near room temperature. Nitrogen-vacancy in diamonds—the creation of “holes” in diamond crystals by replacing a carbon atom with a nitrogen atom—is a promising option. The technique allows for milliseconds-long storage of photons, and if the holes are close enough, they can exchange information. However, current techniques can’t create holes with the required separation. Andreas Albrecht of the University of Ulm in Germany and his colleagues have found a possible solution using biomolecular self-assembly techniques. They took a ring-shaped protein that binds to diamond and modified it to increase the number of binding locations. They then poured a solution of 5-nm nanodiamond crystals over a layer of the modified protein. The result was hexagonal diamond structures in which the distance between the nanodiamonds was small enough to allow interaction between nitrogen-vacancy centers. Albrecht’s team calculated that the system would be capable of significant processing ability, but the group has yet to perform the procedure using nanodiamonds that actually contain nitrogen vacancies.