11 January 2014

A team from the Université de Sherbrooke (UdeS), in collaboration with Canadian and Swiss colleagues, has demonstrated that atoms can communicate freely over long distances.

This is a major advance in quantum computing and another step towards a computer of the same type. The discovery was published in the journal Science.

» Go to to the Science article

Alexandre Blais

Prior to this, experiments were done on photons and atoms confined in space by using a cavity to increase the chances of interaction. “No one [no researcher] had tried such an interaction between two atoms outside a cavity. We succeeded in doing so in our most recent work,” explained an elated Professor Alexandre Blais.

Together with a team from the University of Calgary and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Alexandre Blais and Kevin Lalumière from the Faculty of Science at the UdeS, were able to prove interaction between two artificial atoms even though they were two centimetres apart. An enormous distance in quantum computing!

Source: Université de Sherbrooke
Photo credit: Michel Caron