Floating electrons on a sea of helium
By now, a handful of technologies are leading contenders for producing a useful quantum computer. Companies have used them to build machines with dozens to hundreds of qubits, the error rates are coming down, and they've largely shifted from worrying about basic scientific problems to dealing with engineering challenges.
Yet even at this apparently late date in the field's development, there are companies that are still developing entirely new qubit technologies, betting the company that they have identified something that will let them scale in ways that enable a come-from-behind story. Recently, one of those companies published a paper that describes the physics of their qubit system, which involves lone electrons floating on top of liquid helium.
Trapping single electronsSo how do you get an electron to float on top of helium? To find out, Ars spoke with Johannes Pollanen, the chief scientific officer of EeroQ, the company that accomplished the new work. He said that it's actually old physics, with the first demonstrations of it having been done half a century ago.