This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Researchers from MIT have designed a new qubit architecture that enables qubits to interact with each other much more quickly while remaining very stable. This advance could someday help scientists build practical quantum computers that can run long, complex algorithms with high accuracy.
Qubits, which are the building blocks of a quantum computer, usually only store data and rely on other electronics to perform operations and communicate. But qubits are so fragile and error-prone that it is difficult for scientists to connect enough qubits before they lose their information and need to be reset. The MIT team designed a dual-purpose qubit with two separate parts: one component that stores data and one component that interacts with other qubits and electronics.
This design improves the reliability of the qubit and enables it to operate with a reduced error rate, so it can perform more computations in the same time span. Their simulations indicate that this new qubit architecture could allow significantly faster and higher-fidelity operations than existing designs. While this research is still in its early days, it holds the potential to help scientists build large-scale, useful quantum computers that can solve real problems too difficult for traditional supercomputers to handle.
"This work feels like a big step. It is a new architecture that shows how much these systems can be engineered. We have taken two ideas and put them together in a way that can help us accomplish this qubit co-design that we are looking for, creating a pretty rare combination of the things we need to do quantum error correction," says Alec Yen, who earned an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) Ph.D. this spring and is co-author of a paper describing the new architecture.
He is joined on the paper by lead author Jeremy Kline, an EECS graduate student; Stanley Chen, an MIT undergraduate; and senior author Kevin O'Brien, an associate professor in EECS and principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). The work appears in Physical Review Applied. Just like the bits in a classical computer, quantum bits store information.
But unlike classical bits, quantum bits have very short lifespans and can break down quickly when scientists connect them to make a quantum computer. This degradation, known as decoherence, introduces errors in computations that rapidly build up, derailing long calculations before they are complete. "The goal for doing all this is to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer where you can correct these errors as they happen, so then you can do long computations and actually do useful things with a quantum computer," O'Brien explains.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
