Material Created At Purdue Lets Electrons 'Dance' and Form New State

A team of Purdue University researchers is among a small group in the world that has successfully created ultrapure material that captures new states of matter and could have applications in high-speed quantum computing. The material, gallium arsenide, is used to observe states in which electrons no longer obey the laws of single-particle physics, but instead are governed by their mutual interactions.

Michael Manfra, the William F. and Patty J. Miller Associate Professor of Physics who leads the group, said the work provides new insights into fundamental physics.

"These exotic states are beyond the standard models of solid-state physics and are at the frontier of what we understand and what we don't understand," said Manfra, who also is an associate professor of both materials engineering and electrical and computer engineering. "They don't exist in most standard materials, but only under special conditions in ultrapure gallium arsenide semiconductor crystals."

Quantum computing is based on using the quantum mechanical behavior of electrons to create a new way to store and process information that is faster, more powerful and more efficient than classical computing. It taps into the ability of these particles to be put into a correlated state in which a change applied to one particle is instantly reflected by the others. If these processes can be controlled, they could be used to create parallel processing to perform calculations that are impossible on classical computers.

"If we could harness this electron behavior in a semiconductor, it may be a viable approach to building a quantum computer," Manfra said. "Of course this work is just in its very early stages, and although it is very relevant to quantum computation, we are a long way off from that. Foremost at this point is the chance to glimpse unexplained physical phenomena and new particles."