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Scientists found a new way to improve the fragile, error-prone qubits that make up a quantum computing circuit, and it’s weird.
Qubits tend to make mistakes and can quickly decay as they transmit information. So a team of MIT engineers built artificial superconducting “giant atoms” by coupling regular atoms from multiple elbows. These giant atoms are easier to control and much more difficult to destroy during normal operations. The research, published Wednesday in the magazine. Nature, suggests that these giant atoms could help create quantum computers that are truly practical.
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The problem with traditional qubits, which are the quantum version of 1s and 0s in a classic computer system, is that they can communicate well with adjacent qubits, but information sent through a longer quantum circuit tends to decay.
By contrast, giant atoms can be tuned to not only improve information fidelity, but can also be blocked from transmitting until they are supposed to, which is another problem with existing qubits.
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Ultimately, MIT engineers hope their giant atoms will lead to a simpler, improved form of quantum computers.
“This allows us to experimentally test a new physics regimen that is difficult to access with natural atoms,” MIT engineer Bharath Kannan said in a press release. “The effects of the giant atom are extremely clean and easy to observe and understand.”
“The tricks we employ are relatively simple,” he added, “and as such one can imagine using this for other applications without a great additional burden.”
READ MORE: ‘Giant atoms’ allow quantum processing and communication in one [MIT]
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