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Superconductors

Exponential boost for quantum information

Nature volume 531, pages 177–178 (2016)Cite this article

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Quantum computers will one day wildly outperform conventional machines. An experimental feat reveals a fundamental property of exotic superconductors that brings this quantum technology a step closer. See Letter p.206

Quantum computers promise a technological revolution that will easily surmount otherwise impenetrable problems in cryptography, quantum simulation, drug design and more. Building the hardware has been challenging, however, because unavoidable random noise from the environment readily corrupts quantum bits (qubits). On page 206 of this issue, Albrecht et al.1 pursue an elegant strategy for sidestepping this obstruction. They discover a key property of 'Majorana modes' in superconducting wires that can be used to engineer qubits that are immune to noise by default.

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Figure 1: Majorana modes in superconducting wires.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. and in the Division of Physics, Jason Alicea is in the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, Mathematics and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA.,

    Jason Alicea

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  1. Jason Alicea
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Correspondence to Jason Alicea.

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Quantum physics: Majorana modes materialize

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Alicea, J. Exponential boost for quantum information. Nature 531, 177–178 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/531177a

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