A research team under the leadership of the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory has extended the coherence time of the quantum bit it has developed from 0.1 microseconds to 0.1 milliseconds, marking a near-thousand-fold increase.
Coherence time refers to the amount of time a qubit — the building block of quantum computers — can exist as 0 and 1, a mixed state that needs to be maintained in order for a qubit to work, Argonne said Thursday.
The qubit the team developed features an electron trapped on a neon platform within a vacuum. Neon is an element that does not react with other elements, thereby providing resistance to disturbances from the surrounding environment. Protection from disturbances extends a qubit’s coherence time.
The team’s qubit works by encoding quantum information into the electron’s charge states. This type of qubit, called an electron charge qubit, is simpler to fabricate and operate and is compatible with the infrastructure for classical computers, according to University of Notre Dame professor Dafei Jin, who leads the project at Argonne.
“This simplicity should translate into low cost in building and running large-scale quantum computers,” Jin added.