transmon
The Frequency Crowding Problem: When Qubits Run Out of Room on the Dial
RafayelEvery fixed-frequency transmon on a superconducting quantum chip is a tiny resonator that answers to one particular pitch. Send in a microwave pulse a...
The Purcell Filter: Guarding a Qubit From Its Own Antenna
Every superconducting qubit faces a quiet contradiction. To learn what state it is in, engineers couple it to a small microwave resonator and bounce a...
The Josephson Junction: The Tiny Switch at the Heart of the Qubit
Strip away the gold-plated wiring, the refrigerators the size of a phone booth, and the racks of control electronics, and most of today's quantum comp...
The Leakage Problem: When a Qubit Sneaks Out of Its Own Two Levels
The whole premise of a qubit is that it holds one bit of quantum information in two states, conventionally labeled 0 and 1. It is a tidy abstraction....
The Fluxonium Challenger: The Superconducting Qubit Gunning for the Transmon
Nearly every superconducting quantum computer you have heard of runs on the same basic building block: the transmon. IBM, Google, and Rigetti all stac...
The Tantalum Surprise: How a Material Swap Stretched Qubit Lifetimes
For years the standard recipe for a superconducting qubit looked settled. You patterned thin films of aluminum and niobium on a silicon or sapphire ch...
The Transmon Workhorse: Why Superconducting Circuits Dominate Quantum Computing
If you log into a quantum computer through a cloud service from IBM, Google, or Rigetti, odds are you are talking to a chip made of superconducting ci...