This Tiny Stone Grows Stronger as It Gets Colder—And It Could Rewrite the Future of Quantum Computing - Popular Mechanics

If you want to be an engineer of the future, in many fields that means getting comfortable with cold—extreme cold. Many superconducting materials, for example, require temperatures near zero kelvin to pull off zero electrical resistance. Quantum computers similarly need extra-cold temperatures to ensure their finicky qubits don’t fall apart due to “thermal noise.” Over the decades, scientists have gotten remarkably capable at achieving these temperatures in the laboratory. At the same time, they’ve found materials capable of withstanding the cold while still retaining the mechanical, optical, and electrical properties needed. But sometimes, scientists find ways to use well-known materials in surprising new ways.Advertisement - Continue Reading BelowA team led by scientists from Stanford University discovered that the inorganic compound strontium titanate (SrTiO3), known for being a brilliant diamond substitute in jewelry, maintains its optical and mechanical characteristics at near absolute zero temperatures. In fact, the crystal, also called STO, does much more than just maintain its characteristics; the team says in a recent paper published in the journal Science that it actually improves as the mercury dips, far outpacing current materials used for these low-temperature jobs. This property opens up novel possibilities for developing technologies like quantum computers that rely on cryogenic temperatures, or technologies that must operate in the cold vacuum of space, such as cryogenic fuel tanks for rockets. The material is also easy to manufacture.Strontium titanate isn’t what you’d consider an exotic material. Scientists synthetically created and patented it in the early 1950s before its natural equivalent was found decades later. Despite its rather plain origin story, it actually contains not one but two kinds of material superpowers. The first is that the properties of STO’s photonic effects change in the presence of an electric field. This makes the material capable of fine-tuning the frequency, phase, intensity, and bending of light, which is particularly useful in low-temperature devices. Secondly, STO is piezoelectric—a fancy way of saying it expands and contracts when an electric field is applied. The change in strontium titanate’s optical properties in response to an electric field is 40 times stronger than any other such material, Stanford’s Jelena Vuckovic, PhD, a senior author of the study, said in a press statement. And STO works at cryogenic temperatures, from −238°F to absolute zero.“We knew what ingredients we needed to make a highly tunable material,” study co-author Christopher Anderson, PhD, said in the press statement. “We found that those ingredients already existed in nature, and we simply used them in a new recipe. STO was the obvious choice. When we tried it, surprisingly, it matched our expectations perfectly.”Advertisement - Continue Reading BelowIn the study, the researchers found that under certain conditions, STO outperformed the best nonlinear optical material, lithium niobate, by a factor of 20. It even bested the record-holding cryogenic material, barium titanate, three times over. Scientists also improved STO’s performance by using oxygen isotope substitution, which replaces a common form of oxygen with a heavier one. This pushed the material toward an even better condition for superconductivity.🔮 Check Out Our New Video Series, Pop Mech Explains: PrecognitionYou’ve probably had that eerie feeling before—knowing what’s about to happen before it actually does. Flashes of deja vu. A text from someone you were just thinking about. A dream predicting the future. Coincidence? Or something deeper? Across four chapters, we investigate the science and speculation behind those “gut feelings.” Go Down the Rabbit Hole With Us “By adding just two neutrons to exactly 33 percent of the oxygen atoms in the material, the resulting tunability increased by a factor of four,” Anderson, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said in the statement. “We precisely tuned our recipe to get the best possible performance.”While this is great for low-temperature engineering, the best news is that because STO is so well-known, it is also easy to manufacture, which completely circumvents the impractical downsides of more exotic, lab-grown options. This is likely why tech giants, such as Google and Samsung, partly funded a portion of this research in an attempt to find materials to push technologies like quantum computing to the next level. Until scientists somehow discover the holy grail of materials science—a room-temperature superconductor—advanced physics and quantum technologies will need to rely on components that can operate at ultracold temperatures. With the introduction of materials like STO, these technologies, whether used for quantum transducers or something else entirely, won’t merely survive in these harsh environments—they’ll thrive, opening up a whole new level of capability for quantum computers, space exploration, and possibly future applications we have yet even to dream of.Download Pop Mech Digital IssuesGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueGet the IssueDarren OrfContributing EditorDarren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.