SASKATUN – Ryan Day is studying superconductors. Materials that perfectly transmit electricity, without losing energy from heat and resistance. In particular, a scientist from the University of California at Berkeley is studying how superconductors can coexist with their opposites. insulating materials that stop the flow of electrons. The materials that combine these two opposite states, called topological superconductors, are strange to understand, difficult to characterize and design, but if one could design them correctly, they could play an important role in quantum computing. “Every computer is prone to errors, and that’s no different when it comes to quantum computing — it just gets a lot harder to manage. “Topological quantum computing is one of the platforms that is believed to be able to bypass many of the most common sources of error,” says Day. Day came to the Canadian Light Source at the University of Saskatchewan to use the QMSC beam line, an facility created to explore exactly these types of questions in quantum materials. The capabilities were developed under the leadership of Andrea Damascelli, scientific director of the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute at UBC, with whom Day was a PhD student at the time of the research. The results of this work, published in Physical Review B, provide further evidence that lithium iron arsenide supports topological conditions on its surface, a key to the possible use of the material in quantum computing. It also reveals potential challenges for engineering materials for these applications, an area for future research. “By doing these experiments, we can understand this material much better and start thinking about how we can really use it, and then hopefully someone will build a quantum computer with it and everyone will win.”
