Princeton engineers have created a superconducting qubit that remains stable for three times longer than the strongest designs available today. This improvement represents an important move toward building quantum computers that can operate reliably.
"The real challenge, the thing that stops us from having useful quantum computers today, is that you build a qubit and the information just doesn't last very long," said Andrew Houck, leader of a federally funded national quantum research center, Princeton's dean of engineering and co-principal investigator on the paper. "This is the next big jump forward."
In a Nov. 5 article published in Nature, the Princeton team reported that their qubit maintains coherence for more than 1 millisecond. This performance is triple the longest lifetime documented in laboratory experiments and nearly fifteen times greater than the standard used in industrial quantum processors. To confirm the result, the team constructed a functioning quantum chip based on the new qubit, demonstrating that the design can support error correction and scale toward larger systems.
The researchers noted that their qubit is compatible with the architectures used by major companies such as Google and IBM. According to their analysis, replacing key components in Google's Willow processor with Princeton's approach could increase its performance by a factor of 1,000. Houck added that as quantum systems incorporate more qubits, the advantages of this design increase even more rapidly.
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