Minister for Defence Materiel – More than $12 million investment in priority industry capabilities

30 April 2012

Minister for Defence Materiel Jason Clare today announced more than $12 million in matched funding is being offered to nine Australian companies to commercialise new defence technologies that will contribute to Australia’s Priority Industry Capabilities in the defence sector.

“This is an investment in cutting edge defence technologies developed here in Australia,” Mr Clare said.

Researchers at The Australian National University have developed the fastest random number generator in the world by listening to the ‘sounds of silence’.

The researchers – Professor Ping Koy Lam, Dr Thomas Symul and Dr Syed Assad from the ANU ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology – have tuned their very sensitive light detectors to listen to vacuum – a region of space that is empty.

Physicists at the University of New South Wales have created a transistor composed of a single atom, which is an amazing feat of nanoengineering, and could provide a better foundation for scalable quantum computing. The technique and experiment have been published in Nature Nanotechnology.

The transistor itself is composed of a single phosphorous-31 isotope, which has been precisely placed on a base of silicon using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope in an ultra-high vacuum chamber.

A team of Australian physicists has created the world's first functioning single-atom transistor, which could prove a critical building block toward the development of super-fast computers.

The tiny electronic device, described today in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, uses as its active component an individual phosphorus atom patterned between atomic-scale electrodes and electrostatic control gates.

A new technique for embedding atomic-scale wires within crystals of silicon has revealed that Ohm's law can hold true for wires just four atoms thick and one atom tall. The result comes as a surprise because conventional wisdom suggests that quantum effects should cause large deviations from Ohm's law for such tiny wires. Paradoxically, the researchers hope the finding will aid the development of quantum computers.

Congratulations to the winners of the photo and data competition. Your prize will be an $800 Apple voucher to spend at an Apple Store on a number of products you'd prefer, including an iPad 2 and an iPhone 4S. The winners will be contacted regarding their prize collection and recognition will be made during the Centre Workshop.

Thank you to all those who participated in the competition with images and data. We will compile a display of these for the Centre Workshop and will also be adding these to the website in the next couple of months.

Scientia Professor Michelle Simmons, the Centre Director, a Federation Fellow and a Professor of Physics at The University of New South Wales was awarded the NSW Scientist of the Year Award by the Deputy Premier, the Honourable Andrew Stoner MP on 23rd November at Government House in Sydney.

In the past five years Professor Simmons has pioneered a radical technology for making electronic devices atom by atom in silicon. Her scientific vision has enabled the creation of the world's smallest precision transistor.

The competition is open to students from the Faculty of Engineering at UNSW.

Jarryd is a Ph.D. student working the Quantum Spin Control Program at CQC2T under supervision of Dr. Andrea Morello

Two Centre research students have just been awarded 1st and 2nd prize in the highly competitive UNSW School of Electrical Engineering Thesis Poster Competition.

1st Prize: Rachpon Kalra
Thesis Topic: “Development of a Silicon Single-Atom Quantum Bit with Tuneable Readout Time”
Supervisor: Andrea Morello

2nd Prize: Chi Man (Jason) Cheng
Thesis Topic: “Control and Readout of a Quantum Dot Electron Spin Qubit”
Supervisor: Andrew Dzurak

For their research in advancing the realisation of Quantum Computers, Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak and Dr Andrea Morello of The University of New South Wales have won the 2011 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research. The prize is part of the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes, the most prestigious awards in Australian science. Dr Morello and Professor Dzurak have invented and patented a novel method to electrically read out the spin of a single electron attached to a single atom.

News from The Australian National University
Tuesday 14 June 2011
QUANTUM ENCRYPTION CAN GO THE DISTANCE

In a leap forward for long-distance communication and computer technology, a team of researchers from The Australian National University’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology has worked out how to efficiently trap and then release light.

Abstract:
Groundbreaking research has shown a quantum atom has been tracked inside a living human cell and may lead to improvements in the testing and development of new drugs.

Quantum sensor tracked in human cells could aid drug discovery
Professor Lloyd Hollenberg from the University of Melbourne's School of Physics who led the research said it is the first time a single atom encased in nanodiamond has been used as a sensor to explore the nanoscale environment inside a living human cell.

The 2011 Vice Chancellor's Excellence of a Research Team Award has been won by a team of

Bugs to help clean up mining processes

A new collaborative initiative to deal with water technology issues in the minerals industry in Australia is one of 15 successful applications in two new University of Queensland internal fellowship schemes to foster research excellence.

http://www.physorg.com/wire-news/63964529/bugs-to-help-clean-up-mining-p...

3 April – 28 April 2011
John Morton from University of Oxford visits UNSW for 1 month to work with the silicon team on the single-donor spin resonance project.

http://www.materials.ox.ac.uk/peoplepages/morton.html

Griffith climbs to seventh place in Nature ranking

Griffith University is ranked seventh in Australia and 30th in the Asia-Pacific region in the prestigious Nature Publishing Index 2010 released today.
Nature Publishing Index measures the output of research articles in the Nature family of journals — which include several of the most highly cited journals in the scientific literature.

We report the demonstration of a low-disorder silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor (Si MOS) quantum dot containing a tunable number of electrons from zero to N=27. The observed evolution of addition energies with parallel magnetic field reveals the spin filling of electrons into valley-orbit states. We find a splitting of 0.10 meV between the ground and first excited states, consistent with theory and placing a lower bound on the valley splitting. Our results provide optimism for the realization in the near future of spin qubits based on silicon quantum dots.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.2895

24 January - 21 February 2011
Purdue PhD student Sunhee Lee visits UNSW for 1 month to work with the silicon team.

He is modelling highly doped delta layers using NEMo-3D and is helping to understand transport in silicon quantum dots.

https://engineering.purdue.edu/gekcogrp/research-group/SunheeLee/

Precise interferometric measurement is vital to many scientific and technological applications. Using quantum entanglement allows interferometric sensitivity that surpasses the shot-noise limit (SNL). To date, experiments demonstrating entanglement-enhanced sub-SNL interferometry, and most theoretical treatments, have addressed the goal of increasing signal-to-noise ratios. This is suitable for phase-sensing-detecting small variations about an already known phase.

Quantum computers rely on materials with quantum bits - electron spins, for example - that persist (cohere) longer than the device’s operation times. Longer decoherence times mean lower error rates, and scientists are always on the lookout for materials with usable low-error regimes. Silicon is a prime candidate because one can reduce its concentration of nuclear spins - a source of magnetic noise that interferes with electron spins - by enriching certain isotopes.

Griffith University physicists have shown that Einstein's theory of entangled particles could enhance security for tomorrow's quantum internet.

In a paper published this week in the top international physics journal Nature Physics, the research team at the University's Centre for Quantum Dynamics performed a series of new experiments on pairs of entangled particles, inspired by Einstein's old idea, which he termed "spooky action at a distance".