Tantalum, Silicon, and a Cross-Disciplinary Bet that Paid Off

Researchers from Brookhaven National Laboratory’s C2QA center developed superconducting transmon qubits with coherence times reaching 1.68 milliseconds using tantalum materials and silicon substrates. The team improved qubit performance by reducing energy loss from material defects and interfaces through changes in fabrication materials and processing methods. The breakthrough demonstrates a materials-based approach to improving superconducting qubits while remaining compatible with existing quantum processor architectures. Quantum computing emerged with a promise of mythic proportions: machines capable of solving, in seconds, problems that would take today’s supercomputers millennia to compute. The power of quantum computing relies on quantum bits, or qubits – particles that can exist in multiple states simultaneously. Unfortunately, qubits are also notoriously fragile.…