The new quantum refrigerator, seen here in an artist's conception, is based on superconducting circuits. The device, which cools qubits to record low temperatures, is composed of two qubits — one hot (top right) and one cold (center) — which cool a third, target qubit (bottom left). Powered by heat from a nearby hot environment, the quantum refrigerator extracts thermal energy from the target qubit autonomously and dumps it to a cold environment. As a result, the target qubit reaches a high-quality ground state with minimal error, primed for efficient quantum computation. The device was created in the nanofabrication lab Myfab at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
Credit: Chalmers University of Technology/Boid AB/NIST
If you’d like to solve a math problem on a good old-fashioned chalkboard, you want the board clean and free of any previous markings so that you have space to work. Quantum computers have a similar need for a clean workspace, and a team including scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found an innovative and effective way to create and maintain it.
The research effort, a collaboration with physicists at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, could address one of the main issues confronting quantum computer designers: the need to keep the bits in a superconducting quantum processor free of errors and ready to perform calculations whenever necessary. These “qubits” are notoriously sensitive to heat and radiation, which can spoil their calculations just as stray chalk marks might make the numeral 1 look like a 7.
Erasing these qubits after a calculation involves cooling them to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero and then keeping them there. The team’s method is not ..
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