Q&A: Building Quantum Computers with Superconductors

Circuits have always captivated Britton Plourde. As a kid he designed and built model airplanes, a hobby that required wiring together numerous electronic parts. In graduate school he turned to fabricating even smaller and more complex circuits made from micrometer-sized superconducting materials. Today Plourde heads a group at Syracuse University in New York that is trying to build superconducting elements for a quantum computer. To learn more, Physics met up with Plourde at his lab at Syracuse.