The long road to building a fully functioning quantum computer may have shortened thanks to a new version of a gizmo called a superconducting qubit. The new qubit can maintain its delicate quantum states for more than 1 millisecond, three times the previous best for such a device. Reported last week in Nature, the result suggests a full-fledged quantum computer may need far fewer qubits than previously thought. Most important, the advance was made not by redesigning the qubit, but by improving the materials from which it was fashioned.
“This is great for the field and I’m glad that they published enough data that we really know how [the qubit] is working,” says John Martinis, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who in October shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating quantum effects in electrical circuits. “To me, that’s the best part.”
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