Tapping into computer-chip technology is one of the advantages to building a quantum computer using quantum bits (qubits) hosted by semiconductor quantum dots—tiny “islands” of charge that can be manipulated with electrodes. But one challenge for scaling up to large qubit numbers is the number of individual electrodes required. Now Alexander Ivlev of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and his colleagues have shown a way to dispense with barrier gates—a type of electrode that was thought to be needed to connect every neighboring pair of quantum dots [1]. The researchers say that using this new approach could increase the numbers of qubits on a chip and thus improve the usefulness of solid-state quantum processors.
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