IonQ, a trapped-ion quantum computing company, announced the development of a new method for fabricating qubits using barium ions. The breakthrough, which enables more stable and accurate qubits, will allow IonQ to scale up manufacturing while enabling the company to test more complex quantum error correction protocols using their unique architecture.
The announcement is a significant step for the company’s plan to deliver commercially viable quantum computing systems within the next few years.
A key challenge facing IonQ and other companies working to develop practical quantum computers is scalability. The barium qubit was developed using an alternative method that allows for scalability with current technologies.
“IonQ builds the world’s most powerful quantum computers, and the ability to build systems with barium qubits will help us bring our customers even closer to realizing the commercial benefits of quantum,” “We believe the advanced architectures enabled by barium qubits will be even more powerful and more scalable than the systems we have been able to build so far, opening the door to broader applications of quantum computing.”
Peter Chapman, President, and CEO of IonQ.
IonQ has developed methods for producing and stabilizing high-fidelity barium qubits. The resulting devices demonstrate superior performance with greatly reduced errors, paving the way for higher precision computing solutions.
Some of the key benefits of using barium qubits as outlined by IonQ are:
Because of its mode of control which is with visible light, IonQ will find it easier to scale and build better quantum computers for the future using standard silicon photonics technology
The barium qubits make it easy to connect and network multiple quantum processors together with light, thereby creating a scalable system with higher processing power.
The new barium qubit is more stable and reduces the rate of quantum errors, bringing about improved quantum computers.
“We believe that the addition of barium qubits to IonQ systems opens up tremendous technical opportunities for making our systems more scalable, more reliable, and easier to build,” “By leveraging the inherent advantages of barium qubits, we plan to access new features for building advanced quantum computers that we believe will be relevant for solving critical societal problems.”
Jungsang Kim, Co-Founder, and CTO of IonQ.
IonQ has achieved several milestones this year, including the Evaporated Glass Traps (EGTs), used to make trapped-ion technology more stable and accurate. Also in the list of milestones is the reconfigurable multicore quantum architecture (RMQA), which is expected to rapidly increase the number of qubits in each system. With the introduction of the barium qubits, IonQ believes that quantum computers will exceed expectations by becoming more scalable, stable, and with higher processing power.