Researchers in the US have improved the coherence time of charge quantum bits (qubits) by a factor of 1000 thanks to advances in the materials used to construct them. Led by Dafei Jin of the Argonne Center for Nanoscale Materials and David Schuster of Stanford University and the University of Chicago, the multi-institutional team also showed it was possible to read out the state of these qubits with a fidelity of 98.1% – a value Jin says will increase further with the aid of more sophisticated readout technologies.
Coherence time is vitally important within quantum computing, as it denotes how long a qubit can remain in a superposition of multiple states before environmental noise causes it to decohere, or lose its quantum nature. During this period, a quantum computer can perform complex computations that classical computers cannot.
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