8 states ...

Schrödinger's Cat, forever residing in the nether world of being either alive or dead, is the glamor puss of quantum mechanics, the star participant in a theory most mystifying when it comes to trying to learn how reality works at deep level, is now being applied to building viable quantum computers thanks to Antimony, an element with 8 possible spin states leading to a better way to safeguard the inherently delicate qubit data generated by quantum computers. 

To whit.

Antimony

The new method encodes quantum information onto an antimony atom, which has eight possible states that enable data to be more safely stored than in a standard two-state qubit, or quantum bit.

The breakthrough is a vital step in making errors within quantum systems less likely to occur, and, when they do, make them more easily detected and corrected — a key barrier to the development of quantum computers. The researchers published their findings Wednesday (Jan.14) in the journal Nature Physics.

But if noise within a quantum computer causes this spin to suddenly change (as often happens), the quantum state would be lost, producing an error and destroying the information within.

To get around this problem, the researchers behind the new study embedded an antimony atom, which has eight different spin directions, inside a silicon quantum chip. The six additional spin directions of the antimony atom (obtained by the atom’s composite nature that adds multiple individual spins) means that, unlike in a two spin-state system, a single error isn't enough to destroy the encoded information.

"As the proverb goes, a cat has nine lives. One little scratch is not enough to kill it," co-author Benjamin Wilhelm, a doctoral student in electrical engineering and telecommunications at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, said in a statement. "Our metaphorical 'cat' has seven lives: it would take seven consecutive errors to turn the '0' into a '1'!"

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