Large-scale quantum computing depends a lot on entanglement between the individual particles required for storing data, quantum bits, or qubits.
Quantum computing could exponentially speed up specific tasks, because entanglement provides a greatly enhanced quantity of data to be stored and processed with the same quantity of qubits.
Together with this increase also comes the problem of needing to measure the device many times to find out what it is truly doing - that is, before the quantum computer is up and running, we need to gather an exponentially large amount of information on how it is performing.
Dr Alberto Peruzzo, Senior Research Fellow, School of Engineering, RMIT
Zixin Huang, a PhD student working on the experiment, said: "The current form of computer encodes information in binary form. A higher dimensional state, however, is a particle that contains a message that can be 0, 1, 2 or more, so much more information can be stored and transmitted.
"To date, tools for characterising high-dimensional entangled states are limited. In the future when quantum computers become available, our method can potentially serve as a tool in certifying whether the system has enough entanglement between the qubits.
"It significantly cuts down on the number of measurements needed - in fact, it needs the least number of measurements per dimension. Additionally, unlike some others, this method works for systems of any dimension."