Argonne Researchers Raise Coherence Time in 2023

Quantum networks could one day have a transformative impact on scientific research, financial transactions and national security.

Welcome Back,

There are rare glimmers of when science takes Quantum computing forward and it’s more rare than you think. This one in late 2023 might actually be legit. A significant breakthrough in the pursuit of quantum computing has been achieved by a team led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.

While the U.S. Government isn’t investing in Quantum computing the way China is, The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory is making exciting advances in quantum information science (QIS).

ANL an interesting facility. Argonne is a multidisciplinary science and engineering research center, where talented scientists and engineers work together to answer the biggest questions facing humanity!

What’s the Big Deal?

So in the past week a “breakthrough” stood out to me:

A team led by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has achieved a major milestone toward future quantum computing. They have extended the coherence time for their novel type of qubit to an impressive 0.1 milliseconds—nearly a thousand times better than the previous record.

The research was published in Nature Physics.

“The measured relaxation and coherence times are both on the order of 0.1 ms, surpassing all existing charge qubits and rivalling state-of-the-art superconducting transmon qubits.”

One Thousand Times Better

They have extended the coherence time for their novel type of qubit to an impressive 0.1 milliseconds — nearly a thousand times better than the previous record.

In everyday life, 0.1 milliseconds is as fleeting as a blink of an eye. However, in the quantum world, it represents a long enough window for a qubit to perform many thousands of operations.

"Rather than 10 to 100 operations over the coherence times of conventional electron charge qubits, our qubits can perform 10,000 with very high precision and speed," Dafei Jin, a professor at the University of Notre Dame said.

ANL as a Lab works in concert with universities, industry, and other national laboratories on questions and experiments too large for any one institution to do by itself. Through collaborations here and around the world, they strive to discover new ways to develop energy innovations through science, create novel materials molecule-by-molecule, and gain a deeper understanding of our planet, our climate, and the cosmos.

The announcement was made on October 26th, 2023.

“Thanks to the small footprint of single electrons on solid neon, qubits made with them are more compact and promising for scaling up to multiple linked qubits,” said Xu Han, an assistant scientist in CNM with a joint appointment at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. ​“These attributes, along with coherence time, make our electron qubit exceptionally compelling.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve had a coherence time breakthrough and it won’t be the last.

"The long lifetime of our electron qubit allows us to control and read out the single qubit states with very high fidelity," said Xinhao Li, a postdoctoral appointee at Argonne and the co-first author of the paper. This time is well above the requirements for quantum computing.