New Robust Device May Scale Up Quantum Tech

(Purdue.edu) A theory developed only two years ago proposed a way to make qubits more resilient through combining a semiconductor, indium arsenide, with a superconductor, aluminum, into a planar device. Now, this theory has received experimental support in a device that could also aid the scaling of qubits.The work was led by the Microsoft Quantum lab at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, which fabricated and measured the device.
The Microsoft Quantum lab at Purdue University grew a semiconductor-superconductor heterostructure using a technique called molecular beam epitaxy, and performed initial characterization measurements. The reseasrchers have created a device that could bring more scalable quantum bits. “Because planar semiconductor device technology has been so successful in classical hardware, several approaches for scaling up a quantum computer having been building on it,” said Michael Manfra, Purdue University’s Bill and Dee O’Brien Chair Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and professor of electrical and computer engineering and materials engineering, who leads Purdue’s Microsoft Station Q site.