Hooking up a quantum computer to a quantum battery could make it much more energy-efficient and enable machines to pack more processing power into the same physical space.
Quantum batteries, like regular batteries, can store energy to provide power, but rather than using electrochemical reactions, they are built from quantum bits, or qubits, that can extract energy from quantum processes, like entanglement. While they have the advantage of charging much faster than regular devices, researchers have struggled to build working examples or find practical uses for them.
Now, at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and his colleagues have found that quantum batteries could be used to power quantum computers while generating far less heat than current power supplies.
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Most quantum computers are powered and controlled with wires that have been cooled to extremely low temperatures to avoid upsetting the delicate quantum states used for computation. This requires large, complex systems of wiring that generate vast quantities of heat.
Quach and his team found that powering a quantum computer with an internal quantum battery would mean that some of these external wires could be eliminated, requiring far less cooling.
In a standard quantum computer, each qubit has at least two external cables, known as the drive line and the flux line. 鈥淏y having an internal quantum battery, we can remove the drive line out of the architecture, and that is the considerable energy saving,鈥� says Quach. 鈥淏ecause we can save energy in terms of the amount of cooling we need to have per qubit, we can have more qubits.鈥�
Quach and his team showed that, theoretically, a quantum computer hooked up to a quantum battery could perform the types of computational operations needed for quantum algorithms, and simulated running a quantum operation with this setup.
鈥淚t makes the idea of quantum batteries much more practical now,鈥� says at University College Dublin in Ireland.
鈥淲e鈥檙e still a little bit away from you really needing to worry massively about the energetic efficiency of quantum devices, but there has been a shift in the community recently to thinking [that], if you want quantum devices to be scalable, we do need to make them as efficient as possible,鈥� says Campbell. 鈥淭he reality is, no quantum device is going to be useful if it costs a gargantuan amount of energy in order to keep the system cooled.鈥�
arXiv
