At Yale, progress in the fight against quantum dissipation

Scientists at Yale have confirmed a 50-year-old, previously untested theoretical prediction in physics and improved the energy storage time of a quantum switch by several orders of magnitude. They report their results in the April 17 issue of the journal Nature. High-quality quantum switches are essential for the development of quantum computers and the quantum internet - innovations that would offer vastly greater information processing power and speed than classical (digital) computers, as well as more secure information transmission. "Fighting dissipation is one of the main goals in the development of quantum hardware," said Ioan Pop, a postdoctoral researcher in applied physics at Yale and lead author of the paper. "A quantum switch needs to act reversibly without losing any energy. Our result is very encouraging for the development of superconducting quantum bits acting as switches." Superconducting quantum bits, or qubits, are artificial atoms that represent information in quantum systems. They also manipulate that information as they switch among states - such as "0," "1," or both simultaneously - under the influence of other qubits.