Science Daily August 12, 2020
Until now, quantum researchers have tried to fix errors by adding greater redundancy. Instead of multiple physical qubits needed to maintain one effective qubit, an international team of researchers (Switzerland, USA – UT Austin) propose a single cat qubit that can prevent phase flips all by itself. It encodes an effective qubit into superpositions of two states within a single electronic circuit — in their case a superconducting microwave resonator whose oscillations corresponds to the two states of the cat qubit. They applied microwave frequency signals to a device that is not significantly more complicated than a traditional superconducting qubit. According to the researchers they can change their cat qubit from any one of its superposition states to any other superposition state, on command. They have developed a new way of reading out the information encoded into the qubit. The research may find its use in many aspects of quantum computation with superconducting circuits…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE