This does not mean that the error-corrected qubit was completely stable. Finally, one of the errors that inevitably occurred could not be recovered, because many of its individual atoms changed states at once. But a normal error correction implementation can keep some of these logic qubits stable for up to 90 rounds.
Still, this is not good enough for any complex calculation. But it’s closer than it was before the company rolled out the technique.
Resonant
EeroQ is a startup a different approach to qubits. A number of companies are trying to use the spin of electrons as their qubits because it’s easy to make chips that can manipulate electrons, which are usually stored in quantum dots. EeroQ makes its chips with many small pools that can hold a drop of liquid helium. When an electron is placed on top of this drop, helium has nowhere to go because it hates to carry an extra electron. So a single electron just floats on the surface.
That’s great, but physics was well established long before the company started. The problem was that no one had found a way to usefully interact with the electron.
Recently, the company released the manuscript describes a new version of the chip with a small resonator next to a helium-filled pool. They showed that this resonator can be coupled to the motion of the electron, which does not hit the walls of the pool with the electric field. Because the electron’s motion states are quantized, the resonator accepts one or two states during the experimental procedure, which is the potential building block of the qubit.
Still, having a functional computing device isn’t even close. But again, this kind of incremental work is needed if any of these technologies are to live up to their promise.
