Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT; Head Office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President: Satoshi Miura) and Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST; Head Office: Kawaguchi-shi, Saitama; President: Kazuki Okimura) have invented a novel atom chip: "Persistent Supercurrent Atom Chip", and demonstrated a stable atom trap in the vicinity of a surface.

  A novel atom chip that is developed by NTT basic research laboratories and JST generates a magnetic field for trapping atoms with a persistent current running through a loop superconducting circuit on a chip surface without a power supply. The persistent supercurrent atom chip is theoretically noise free, and expected to overcome the thermal and current noise problem for realizing single atom traps. With this technique, if we can array single atoms, we will get a new approach for developing a quantum computer with neutral atom qubits. The achievement will be published in "Physical Review Letters" (an American Physical Science Magazine) on 29 June.

  The research and development was done as a part of the JST CREST project "Development of quantum computation system with neutral atoms" directed by Prof. Fujio Shimizu in "Creation of new technology aiming for the realization of quantum information processing systems" (President: Yoshihisa Yamamoto).

=> Superconducting Quantum Physics Research Group

Fig. 1: Atom chip mechanism and Persistent supercurrent atom chip

Fig. 2: How to induce the persistent current

Fig. 3: How to observe the trapped atomic cloud, and an experimental result with a calculated potential.