A member of the Australian research team which made a breakthrough result in teleportation in June is now helping Australia lead the world in new computer technologies.
Dr Tim Ralph is one of seven researchers who will share in $500,000 worth of UQ Foundation Research Excellence Awards at a UQ Centre function, St Lucia, on September 26.
Dr Ralph and his colleagues in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Special Research Centre (SRC) for Quantum Computer Technology at UQ are at the cutting edge in developing the next generation of computers, quantum computers, using particles of light instead of silicon chips.
Quantum computers offer a solution to the “brick wall” confronting scientists in their drive towards ever-smaller chips.
Current technology is thought to run into fundamental physical barriers (size and cost) around the year 2010. Researchers are looking at a way forward by building computers at the level of single atoms and single electrons, using quantum physics rather than everyday physics and electronics.
By exploiting properties of quantum information, quantum computers make many attempts to solve hard problems at the same time, allowing calculations in a matter of seconds which now take weeks to achieve.
Dr Ralph said laser light was used commercially to encode, communicate and store information. Under high-precision conditions, single light particles, called photons, could be isolated.
“Elementary particles such as photons obey the laws of quantum mechanics and as a result behave very differently from everyday objects,” he said. “If information is encoded on single photons (or small groups of them), it too acquires very different, and potentially useful properties.
“Experiments with light designed to exploit these properties are under way at The University of Queensland. The project to be funded by the research excellence award aims to map out the medium-term directions of these experiments.
“This research is part of a large, multi-disciplined international effort to harness the power of quantum information, which is expected to be a major technology in the future. We expect the research to produce clear experimental strategies for our optical approach.”
The quantum computation project has links to other highly innovative projects in which Dr Ralph is involved, including cryptopgraphy and teleportation. He invented a scheme for quantum cryptography with continuous variables at a time when other world experts doubted this would be possible.
Dr Ralph and colleagues at ANU in June announced they had developed high-quality prototypes for the concept of teleportation. Teleportation is the disembodiment of an object in one location and reconstruction in a different location in a split second, a concept familiar to Star Trek viewers, though in these experiments it is particles of light which are moved, not people. The project has applications in quantum computers, cryptography (coding) and communications technology.
This type of technology may dramatically increase the speed and quantity of information that can be transferred via fibre optics. It may also ensure the absolute security of encrypted information and enable quantum computers, which use the flow of light rather than electrons, to operate. A teleporter is a basic requirement for quantum computers, to transfer information from one place to another.
Dr Ralph said the importance of the new quantum computer project was its placement at the edge of new theoretical ideas, while simultaneously being placed at the “coal face”, due to the immediate applicability of these ideas to experiments.
Dr Ralph is the Program Manager for Quantum Optics in the SRC for Quantum Computer Technology, as well as an ARC Queen Elizabeth II Fellow in UQ’s Physics Department.
An ANU PhD graduate, he is a prolific author of two book chapters, 60 articles in refereed scientific journals, 21 refereed conference proceedings, two provisional patents and one international patent. His articles feature heavily in international citation indexes and his projects have attracted more than $3 million in competitive research grants in the past six years.
Media: For further information, contact Dr Tim Ralph (telephone 07 3365 3412 or email: Ralph@physics.uq.edu.au) or Jan King at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 1120 or mobile 0413 601 248).
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