superconducting Quantum technology has long held promise of bridging the gap between existing electronic devices and the delicate quantum landscape behind them. Unfortunately, progress in stabilizing critical processes has stagnated over the past decade.
Finally, a significant step forward has been made: University of Maryland researchers have produced superconducting qubits that last ten times longer than before.
What makes qubits so useful in computing is that their quantum properties are linked together in ways that are mathematically convenient for making short work of certain complex algorithms and solving select problems in seconds that other technologies can’t would take decades or longer.
Unfortunately, these critical properties don’t just entangle with other qubits — they can interleave with everything in their environment, often before their valuable information can be measured.
Now researchers have built a so-called fluxonium qubit that can store information for 1.43 milliseconds. This might seem like a super short time flash, but it’s a 10x upgrade previous record.
There is more than one way to build a qubit, and each approach has its own proponents.
Fluxonium is a type of qubit based on what happens at key nodes in a superconducting circuit.
A major benefit of using superconducting systems to measure the quantum properties of electrons is that they are are already based on electronic circuits – something we have a lot of experience in making.
This is one of the reasons why fluxonium qubits are theoretically better suited larger systems And limit errors. But until now, coherence times (the time data can be recorded) have been too short to be useful.
This latest advance puts fluxonium qubits back in competition with transmon qubits, the type of superconducting qubits currently favored by companies like Google and IBM their quantum computers.
“Remarkably, the coherence time, even in the millisecond range, is limited by material absorption and could be further improved with more rigorous manufacturing.” write the researchers in their published work.
“Our demonstration could be useful for suppressing errors in next-generation quantum processors.”
In other words, the researchers are confident that fluxonium qubits can go further in terms of coherence and stability. That will be important for scientists Try enlarging it her quantum computing Systems using a variety of metrics.
key to the improvement here There were changes to the operating frequency and circuit parameters that increased the qubit’s relaxation time: the time it takes to transition between its possible states and during which data can be logged.
Obviously there is still a lot to do to prepare qubits for practical use – mostlyThey still need extremely low temperatures to work, for example — but if we jump ahead ten times with each new study, our quantum computing future could be here sooner than we think.
“Much work is still needed to build superconducting large processors with coherence times in the millisecond range, and our case study shows that this goal is feasible in the short term.” write Researchers.
The research was published in Physical Examination Letters.
