PALO ALTO, Calif., BURNABY, B.C., — September 13, 2023 — Quantum computing company D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) announced progress in its development of high coherence qubits, with results expected to have a significant impact on its future quantum technologies, according to the company. D-Wave has designed, manufactured, and operated fluxonium qubits that have demonstrated quantum properties that are comparable to the best seen to date in scientific literature, the company said.
The fluxonium qubit, pioneered by Michel Devoret and his colleagues at Yale University in 2009, has recently become an attractive candidate for use in next-generation gate model quantum computing architectures. Given the growing industry interest and D-Wave’s expertise in building flux-like qubit quantum technologies, the company explored the use of fluxonium in its own technology development efforts. D-Wave has manufactured and tested fluxonium qubits in a 2-dimensional circuit geometry. The measured coherence properties, with relaxation times in excess of 100 microseconds, are comparable to the current state-of-the-art for such qubits. In addition, the measured effective temperature of its fluxonium, 18 millikelvin, is among the best that has been reported in the scientific literature to date for superconducting qubits.
“These results show that fluxonium is a viable candidate qubit for D-Wave’s gate model quantum computing architectures. Moreover, in doing this work we have learned that fluxonium can address some of the known shortcomings of competing superconducting gate model qubits,” said Mark Johnson, SVP of quantum technologies and systems products at D-Wave. “We believe this will have a significant impact on D-Wave’s hardware development and reinforces our technical leadership by demonstrating that we can design, manufacture, and operate high-coherence fluxonium qubits that are comparable to the best in the world.”
