A new Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program aims to explore the potential of quantum heterostructures and other manmade metamaterials to regulate the temperature of superconducting electronic devices.
The Synthetic Quantum Nanostructures program will cover demonstration, testing and validation of experimental technologies from the disruption opportunity phase previously announced by DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, the agency said Wednesday.
DARPA introduced the SynQuaNon effort to address obstacles in cooling down devices used in quantum computing. Such equipment need to stay at a fraction of degree above zero Kelvin, or -460 degrees Fahrenheit, which normally requires large, power-consuming refrigeration units.
The agency expects participants to come up with scalable prototypes that use energy-efficient, synthetic nano patterned structures to manage the temperature of the devices.
“If we can increase the operating temperature for new superconducting nanoelectronic devices by a factor of 10, for example, the size of the refrigerator required for cooling goes down by more than a factor of 100,” said Mukund Vengalattore, program manager at the Defense Sciences Office.
“By reducing the power and cooling overhead required, we can reduce the [size, weight and power] significantly as well as improve other device-relevant metrics.”
