Superconducting Quibits

Tne means of approaching the burgeoning field of quantum information processing is by way of superconducting quantum bits (qubits). Qubits differ in two major ways from classical computation bits: qubits can be in a superposition of states, while classical bits are only capable of being either on or off, and qubits become entangled when they are part of a system. Entanglement properties allow the number of possible states in qubit systems to be exponential in the number of qubits. Our qubit’s main components are an inductor-capacitor (LC) resonator in parallel with a Josephson junction. These components come together to create a macroscopic quantum system (approximately 200 X 200 microns) that can be used to test current quantum mechanics theory. The greatest challenge in our qubit design insofar has been making a capacitor for the LC resonator with very low losses. The inherent resistance in our capacitor causes our qubit to artificially relax from its excited site to its ground state in too short a time. It is believed, that qubits are very scalable; when a high enough quality qubit is made, scaling the system up to contain a large number of qubits should be relatively straightforward.