This is a universe in which the most amazing
things happen.
So I'll give you an example; if you have an
electron, just in free space, that electron,
as far as we know, is not made out of any
finer stuff.
I mean, an electron is indivisible.
That's what all high degree physics experiments
tell us.
However, imagine a lower dimensional, two
dimensional universe for electrons and you
apply a strong magnetic field, and then cool
them down to really low temperatures…
Inside of this two dimensional universe that
rule is very, very, strikingly violated.
So that electron can essentially split, it
can fragment into smaller pieces that carry
a third of an electron charge or a fifth of
an electron charge.
That, to me, is amazing.
That’s crazy.
It took a lot of thinking to figure it out.
It turns out that the electrons form a state
that's a liquid.
But it's a quantized liquid in a very funny
way and the way that it's quantized is that
they can make bubbles.
Bubbles is like a place where you won't have
electrons.
And when you ask what's the smallest bubble
you can have according to quantum mechanics,
that smallest bubble displaced a third of
an electron.
You cannot break the bubble down and any charge
fluctuation that you will see in that liquid
will consist of several of these bubbles.
I mean, there's various other sides of this
which are also quite cool, but another really
neat thing that's going on in this kind of
universe is that the electrons have in some
sense become knotted up with each other.
So when the electron splits into some number,
say three, in some ways you should think about
them as not just splitting but like being
little needles and they have a string that
goes back to the dawn of time for that system
and then when another electron comes and circles
around one of those bubbles, it turns out
that their threads knot.
You can actually keep track of how many times
one electron circled another.
The wave function is like a register of what’s
the knot that your system created.
Ok, so now, let's talk about quantum information.
So the usual problem with why quantum computing
has proven to be so hard is that basically
external noise from the environment is always
corrupting the quantum information which we're
trying so desperately to preserve in our quantum
computer,
So for example, a stray bit of photons might
leak into the quantum computer and if you're
trying to store the quantum information in
some local property of your system maybe a
property of an atom or something like that,
well that photon can hit the atom and then
mess up your quantum information.
However, these bubbles that carry fractional
charge, which we’re telling you about they're
called anyons, the beautiful thing about this
is that you can use their behavior to make
a noise free quantum computer.
So let's think about the set up of your device
and I'm producing two anyons.
Now, think about the two anyons being together
as being some particle that has some degree
of freedom that can be either up or down like
a spin.
Or maybe like a coin.
But now you separate them and then it turns
out they still have that property, but you
can't tell what that spin is when you look
at each individual.
In order to know what's in the box you need
to bring them together and then you find out.
You can't look at this one or at that one
separately and figure out what the information
is.
Therefore, you cannot disturb it.
The environment is still providing all this
noise but you no longer care because my qubit
is neither here nor there.
It’s sort of in both places in an essential
way.
It's just a very clever way of basically storing
the information which is by default hidden
from the environment.
It's like your computer has the perfect coding,
the perfect encryption, nobody can see it.
So suppose you want to record something like
zero or one then you tell me what you want
to record.
So we make the two anyons, we put your information
into the vessel
Split it, information is gone but now we can
manipulate that information by taking another
two anyons…
So for instance, you give me another number,
we put them in another pair and now we can
make operations on those two by just taking
one anyon from one pair, another anyon from
the other pair, turning them around each other
and separating everything.
We just manipulated the information.
Kind of like braiding strands of hair around
one another.
So you somehow take your anyons and start
moving them around each other and that changes
these zero's and one's that you're encoding
in a very precise way that you as a user control
depending on precisely how you braided them
around each other.
You know, the entire time.
The information is hidden.
You're manipulating it by doing this but you
still cannot read it without bringing them
together.
I mean, you still need to engineer the thing.
That's the billion dollar question of course.
It's just not easy but there has been a sort
of revolution in how we approach the problem
which I think is pretty exciting.
So we're figuring out how to leverage technology
that goes into making ordinary computers so
amazingly powerful.
Taking semi-conductors and then modify those
semi-conductors.
To essentially force the electrons into behaving
in extraordinary ways that we need to get
these anyons.
It seems that we have lots more tools to bring
to the table than we had even five years ago.
That's what we find so inspirational is the
prospect of making these new interesting discoveries
about how how the universe operates.
And at the same time with possibly applications
that might allow us to solve one of the great
outstanding technological challenges of our
generation, building a quantum computer.
You really just don't know what nature will
serve you.
We discover new universes all the time.
The mysteries are just piling up.
