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.