Scientists granted £1.2m to develop atom chip

The promise of quantum computing and ultra-accurate sensors could soon be one step closer with the announcement that an EPSRC grant awarded to scientists to develop atom chip devices.

Atom chips could replace current chip technology.

Dr Michael Kraft at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science and Professor Edward Hinds at Imperial College have been awarded a £1.2 million Basic Technology Translation Grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop the devices.

They hope to take the knowledge of basic atom chip building blocks which they have developed over the past four years and integrate them on a single chip so that they can be developed into systems robust enough to perform useful functions.

“Over the past four years, we have done the fundamental research into atom chips,” said Dr Kraft. “Now it’s time to make application-orientated devices.”

The researchers have found that atom chips have potential uses in a variety of technologies. For example sensors with unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity; quantum computing, which harnesses physical phenomenon unique to quantum mechanics to realise a new mode of information processing, and atom interferometers, instruments that exploit the wave characters of atoms.

“There is a growing need for unprecedented accuracy in accelerometers and gyroscopes,” said Dr Kraft. “Quantum information processors are potentially leading to quantum computers and atom chip devices will facilitate this process.”