Quantum computing via Buckyball

I posted an entry few days ago which said that Iijima would come to give a lecture in the nanoforum of our university. Yesteday I listened other two lectures in the nanoforum about buckyball by Takeshi Akasaka and Shigeru Nagase.

Akasaka’s works focus on the experimental organic chemstry. His group made a lot of effort to investigate the feather endohedral fullerene molecules. The name of his lecture is “New Progress in Chemistry of Endohedral Metallofullerenes”. Nagase is a theoretical computing chemistist. He and Akasaka collaborate and have maken many good works in quantum chemistry computing. His lecture was named “Nano-molecules and Computational Chemistry”.

The Japanese accents of their English troubled me a lot to follow their lecture. At last, by the help of slides, I catch up with some information. I guess maybe this endohedral metallofullerenes could be used to do quantum computing during the lecture. But this idea only lived a few seconds in my brain for I have no idea on fullerence.

Today, I find a paper in arxiv that investigated posibility to use the model of endoheral metallofullences to realise quantum computing. Here is the abstract

We have studied a system composed by two endohedral fullerene molecules. We have found that this system can be used as good candidate for the realization of Quantum Gates Each of these molecules encapsules an atom carrying a spin,therefore they interact through the spin dipole interaction. We show that a phase gate can be realized if we apply on each encased spin static and time dependent magnetic field. We have evaluated the operational time of a $\pi$-phase gate, which is of the order of ns. We made a comparison between the theoretical estimation of the gate time and the experimental decoherence time for each spin. The comparison shows that the spin relaxation time is much larger than the $\pi$-gate operational time. Therefore, this indicates that, during the decoherence time, it is possible to perform some thousands of quantum computational operations. Moreover, through the study of concurrence, we get very good results for the entanglement degree of the two-qubit system. This finding opens a new avenue for the realization of Quantum Computers.

They theoretically shown the possibility of quantum comupation via buckyball. Thanks to the works of chemistists such as Takeshi Akasaka and Shigeru Nagase et al., this scheme is very promising and will be realised in experiment soon. This is another example that chemistry and physics are connected closely.