Superconducting nanocircuits for topologically protected qubits

By S. Gladchenko, D. Olaya, E. Dupont-Ferrier, B. Douçot, L. Ioffe, Michael Gershenson. 2008

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For successful realization of a quantum computer, its building blocks—the individual qubits—should be simultaneously scalable and sufficiently protected from environmental noise. Recently, a novel approach to the protection of superconducting qubits has been proposed. The idea is to prevent errors at the hardware level, by building a fault-free logical qubit from ‘faulty’ physical qubits with properly engineered interactions between them. The decoupling of such a topologically protected logical qubit from local noises is expected to grow exponentially with the number of physical qubits. Here, we report on proof-of-concept experiments with a prototype device that consists of twelve physical qubits made of nanoscale Josephson junctions. We observed that owing to properly tuned quantum fluctuations, this qubit is protected against magnetic flux variations well beyond linear order, in agreement with theoretical predictions. These results suggest that topologically protected superconducting qubits are feasible. An array of superconducting nanocircuits has been designed that provides built-in protection from environmental noises. Such ‘topologically protected’ qubits could lead the way to a scalable architecture for practical quantum computation.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/45c70b449ba60821538cc6efecee64e22c6e5407

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Quantum error correction for quantum memories (2013, unknown): “Douçot and Ioffe (2012) reviewed several ideas for the topological protection of quantum information in superconducting systems, while Gladchenko et al. (2009) demonstrated their experimental feasibility.”
Atomic physics and quantum optics using superconducting circuits (2011, methodology): “Recently, an experiment [85] was implemented for a prototype device that consisted of twelve physical qubits made of nanoscale Josephson junctions.”
A no-go theorem for a two-dimensional self-correcting quantum memory based on stabilizer codes (2008, background): “(6) Therefore, if we want d‡ to grow with L we must look for codes with the distance d growing with L .”