(T) Professor Martinis from UCSB and his team of students have made recently a significant contribution to the field of quantum computing. Their contribution has been so significant that Google proposed earlier this month a collaboration with Professor Martinis’ lab.

Professor Martinis’s approach is to design superconducting quantum circuits whose qubits are Josephson junctions of two layers of superconductor separated by a thin insulating layer. The results could hold the promise to deliver quantum computing hardware that improves the accuracy of performing qubits’ operations.

For more on his research, the following are three useful materials:

1. Talk about the “Design of a Superconducting Quantum Computer”

2. “Superconducting quantum circuits at the surface code threshold for fault tolerance”, an article in Nature

“A quantum computer can solve hard problems, such as prime factoring, database searching, and quantum simulation, at the cost of needing to protect fragile quantum states from error. Quantum error correction provides this protection by distributing a logical state among many physical quantum bits (qubits) by means of quantum entanglement. Superconductivity is a useful phenomenon in this regard because it allows the construction of large quantum circuits and is compatible with microfabrication. For superconducting qubits, the surface code approach to quantum computing is a natural choice for error correction, because it uses an only nearest-neighbor coupling and rapidly cycled entangling gates. The gate fidelity requirements are modest: the per-step fidelity threshold is only about 99 percent. Here we demonstrate a universal set of logic gates in a superconducting multi-qubit processor, achieving an average single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.92 percent and a two-qubit gate fidelity of up to 99.4 percent. This places Josephson quantum computing at the fault-tolerance threshold for surface code error correction. Our quantum processor is a first step towards the surface code, using five qubits arranged in a linear array with nearest-neighbor coupling. As a further demonstration, we construct a five-qubit Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger state, using the complete circuit and full set of gates. The results demonstrate that Josephson quantum computing is a high-fidelity technology, with a clear path to scaling up to large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum circuits.”

3. “Error-Free Quantum Computing Made Possible in New Experiment”, an article in IEEE Spectrum

References

“Natural Quantum Computer”, A Silicon Valley Insider
“What are Josephson junctions? How do they work”, Scientific American

Note: The picture above is a gmon transmon Qubit – picture from Michael Fang.

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