Austrian Team Couples Electron Microscope to Quantum Computer to Sharpen Images

A team at TU Wien, together with researchers from the University of Vienna, JKU Linz and the University of Innsbruck, has developed a method to couple the electron beam of an electron microscope to a quantum computer, aiming to extract more information from each electron than conventional imaging allows. The work, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters and currently available on the arXiv preprint server, is particularly aimed at imaging sensitive samples, such as individual proteins, that cannot tolerate large numbers of electrons.

"Today, we can image tiny details on the atomic scale," said Philipp Haslinger of TU Wien's Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics. "However, this requires a large number of electrons. And not every sample can be exposed to so many electrons without being damaged." The team's approach lets electrons interact with ions held in place along the beam's path inside a quantum computer, which can create quantum entanglement -- a shared quantum state -- between an electron and the quantum computer, said Elias Pescoller, a doctoral student and the paper's first author.

Each ion "carries information about the electron" after this interaction, and by performing specific quantum-computing operations as further electrons pass through, the researchers can combine information from several electrons to produce a stronger signal using relatively few of them, said Dennis Ratzel, also of TU Wien's atomic physics institute. "What would previously have been indistinguishable from random noise can thus become a clear signal," added Iva Brezinova of TU Wien's Institute for Theoretical Physics.

So far, the team has demonstrated the method's advantages mathematically; the next step is building it. At TU Wien's University Service Center for Transmission Electron Microscopy, an ion-based quantum computer developed by Philipp Schindler's team at the University of Innsbruck is now being integrated into an electron microscope, drawing on quantum information, quantum computing and electron microscopy expertise from universities across Austria.