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By John P. Mello Jr.
Feb 3, 2021 4:33 AM PT
A step toward engineering a new generation of powerful quantum computers has been made by a team of scientists and engineers at the University of Sydney, Microsoft and EQUS, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems.
The team, which published their findings in the Jan. 25 issue of Nature Electronics, invented a cryogenic computer chip capable of functioning at temperatures near absolute zero, which could enable a new crop of high performance quantum computers capable of performing calculations with thousands of qubits, or more.
Qubits are the quantum equivalent of the bits used by traditional computers. Because qubits aren't binary -- they don't process information using zeroes and ones -- they're capable of much faster performance. For a variety of reasons, however, quantum computers, up to now, could only accommodate a few dozen qubits. That's why the new cryo chip, called Gooseberry, is such a breakthrough.