Topic
Josephson-junction-based circuits that act as quantum bits, a leading hardware platform for building and controlling quantum computers.
Stanford researchers report quantized jumps in phonons, the quanta of mechanical vibration, using thin-film lithium niobate devices. Team leader Amir Safavi-Naeini says error correction and mass spectrometry need phonon lifetimes 10 times longer.
Reality
Physicists at Stanford, the University of Chicago and SLAC let one superconducting qubit address seven memory cells, at about 1.2% error per access. The tests measured access error, much of it from crosstalk between cells, so the promised cut in wiring per qubit is still a design argument.
Reality
Quantum jumps were caught in trapped ions in 1986 and in photons in 2007. A resonator that rings for two milliseconds, read out by a superconducting qubit, now shows a single phonon going to zero as it happens.
Reality
Stanford physicists report in Science the first real-time observation of quantum jumps of sound, using a superconducting qubit to check a mechanical resonator hundreds of times during its two milliseconds of vibration.
Reality
A Physical Review Letters paper from Chalmers puts a wide class of bosonic operations inside a single driving cycle. The 1,000-fold figure counts cycles, and no fidelity or hardware measurement accompanies it.
Reality
The design pairs a long-lived qubit with a strongly interacting one through a coupler the group built earlier, and the reported gains in speed and fidelity come from simulation rather than from a fabricated chip.
Reality