“YOU CAN MAKE THE SYSTEM BEHAVE AS IF THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT TIME DIRECTIONS.”

The future of computing

Physicists fired a sequence of laser pulses that mimicked the Fibonacci sequence into a quantum computer and ended up creating a new phase of matter in the process, according to a study published in Nature earlier this year.

They suggest that the newly discovered phase of matter is particularly robust at preserving information, more so than currently used methods.

It’s a potentially huge advance that could allow quantum computers to be much more reliable, since with current technology, maintaining qubits in their quantum states is a precarious task.

The qubit dilemma

In quantum computing, a one or a zero is not stored as an ordinary bit, but as a qubit. What sets a qubit apart is that it can be one or zero at the same time, potentially allowing quantum computers to perform much more advanced calculations that classical computers take much longer to complete.

Quantum computers still have a long way to go before they reliably reach that kind of speed or be practical in everyday use. For one, qubits require an extremely controlled environment in which a slight perturbation, such as a tiny change in temperature, could cause the qubits to lose their quantum states… and their information.

In the experiment, a regular qubit at each end of an alignment of ten atoms retained its quantum state for 1.5 seconds. But when they bombarded those atoms with a pulse of laser light at the rate of Fibonacci numbers (a sequence of numbers where each number is the sum of the previous two), the qubits lasted a whopping 5.5 seconds.

And according to physicists, the reason this happens has to do with time itself.

“What we realized is that by using quasi-periodic sequences based on the Fibonacci pattern, you can make the system behave as if there were two different directions of time,” said the study’s lead author, Philip Dumistrescu, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute Research Center. Computational Quantum Physics, he told Gizmodo in a recent interview .

Clear errors

But why Fibonacci numbers? In essence, when laser pulses are fired following Fibonacci numbers, they act as a kind of quasicrystal, physicists say, a structure of matter that adheres to a pattern, but is not periodic.

That is, ordered, but not repetitive.

“With this almost periodic sequence, a complicated evolution occurs that cancels out all the errors that live on the edge,” Dumistrescu explained in a press release. “Because of this, the edge remains quantum-mechanically coherent for much, much longer than one would expect.”