Quantum in the Palm of Your Hand : The Evolution of Superconducting Qubits

Electrons zipping through transistors, powering the screens on our smartphones. Light zooming from distant stars to Earth, moving faster than anything else in the universe. Protons enabling MRI machines to analyze people’s injuries. Quantum mechanics explains the behavior of subatomic particles like electrons, photons, and protons. In contrast to classical physics that we can observe with our senses, particles in the quantum realm have unusual behaviors. Even though quantum particles make common technologies possible, we don’t experience these behaviors in our everyday world. That’s why a discovery in 1985 was such a big deal. In a laboratory in the University of California, Berkeley, a team of three scientists showed that a system you could see could demonstrate quantum behavior. Or as they said in one of the journal articles covering the experiments, the system was “big enough to get one’s grubby fingers on.” Four decades later, John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize for that research. Over those four decades, quantum researchers have transformed what at the time seemed like an interesting discovery into a full-blown technological field. Building on that fundamental research supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, scientists have turned…