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Physics Technology

Tiny bits of graphene

help reveal secrets
Huge optical computer could
of ice formation outpace quantum computing
Leah Crane Edd Gent

WHEN a droplet of water freezes, A MACHINE being built from

it usually starts with a tiny particle
on which the first ice crystals form
before they spread through the rest
of the water. Now we know exactly
how big a particle needs to be to
start the process, potentially paving
the way to new forms of antifreeze.
Water doesn’t always turn to ice
at the same temperature. “A bottle
of very pure water remains liquid
even below 0°C,” says Xin Zhou
at the University of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences in Beijing. To
freeze, water requires ice nuclei to
a 5-kilometre-long fibre-optic
cable coiled into a box a few
metres across could give
quantum computers a run
for their money on certain
tasks. The device, which will
perform calculations using
pulses of light, will be one of
the most sophisticated optical
computers ever made.
The computer, which is being
built by Hiroyuki Tamura and
colleagues at Japanese tech
firm NTT, is designed to solve

CULTURA CREATIVE (RF) / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

be present. Most commonly, these
are small particles of impurities.
To see how particle size affects
this process, Zhou and his team
used trillions of flecks of graphene
oxide. They mixed water with a
given size of tiny sheets of the
material, from 3 square nanometres
to 50 square nanometres, and
then lowered the temperature.
When they used flecks smaller
than 8 square nanometres, the
ice nucleation effect was weak,
with ice only forming on the
edges of the nanosheets at
around -27.5°C. But at 8 square
nanometres, nucleation was
much more notable and the
critical temperature where ice
starts to form jumped up by about
10°C (Nature, doi.org/dg73).
They concluded that a particle
must be about 8 square nanometres
or bigger to act as an ice nucleus
at these temperatures. They also
confirmed that the process was
the same with other nanoparticles.
The effect works in reverse,
too. When they tested a coating
of particles smaller than 8 square
nanometres applied to a surface, it
impeded ice formation, so a similar
material could be used on anything
you don’t want to get icy, says Zhou.
He hopes that this knowledge will
allow us to design better antifreeze
coatings, for example for aircraft to
prevent a dangerous ice build-up. ❚
optimisation problems. These
involve finding the best solution
out of many possible ones,
such as the best way to balance
an energy grid or the most
efficient way to schedule
deliveries around a city.
Rather than relying on
electrical circuits, the device
will shoot 100,000 optical
pulses into the coil, where they
will follow each other round
in a procession. Optimisation
problems typically involve
complex interconnected
networks, so a special
computer chip will encode the
characteristics of this network
into the pulses as they fly past.
The pulses circulate around the
coil tens or hundreds of times,
100,000
Number of pulses of light the
computer can control at once
interacting with each other
until they find a stable state
representing the best solution.
The team has previously built
a version that could squeeze
2000 pulses into a 1-kilometre-
long fibre. The new version
will fit 100,000 pulses into
5 kilometres of fibre. That
will allow the computer to
model problems with up to
100,000 moving parts, such
as the layout of real-world
communication networks.
“This would definitely be
quite groundbreaking,” says
Charles Roques-Carmes, who
studies optical computing at
the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. At that scale,
conventional computers would
take centuries to find exact
solutions and even programs
designed to find approximate
solutions to real-world problems
would be slow, he says.
Optimisation problems are
challenging for conventional
computers because the number
of possible solutions rises
exponentially as the problem
grows, requiring ever more
computing power. Quantum
computers have a natural
advantage over conventional
computers on these problems,
but the technology is still in
its infancy (see page 10).
In a paper published last year,
Will optical computers
ever see the light
of day?
NTT’s computer containing
a 1-kilometre-long fibre was
tested against the D-Wave
2000Q , the first commercial
quantum computer, on a series
of experimental optimisation
problems. While the D-Wave
did better at small problems,
NTT’s device did significantly
better on bigger problems with
many interconnections, which
are more indicative of real-
world problems.
More powerful and broadly
applicable quantum computers
being developed by companies
like Google and IBM may
ultimately outperform the
optical computer, says Tamura,
but it will probably be decades
until they are large enough.
The 100,000 pulse machine
should be ready within a year
or two, he says. ❚

4 January 2020 | New Scientist | 13