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Topological qubits

A bit of both

Nature Physics volume 7, pages 450–451 (2011)Cite this article

'Standard' qubits have been implemented in diverse physical systems. Now, so-called topological qubits are coming into the limelight, and could potentially be used for decoherence-free quantum computing. Coupling these two types of qubit might enable devices that exploit the virtues of both.

Two revolutionary inventions drive today's digital information processing and computation: the transistor as a building block and the integrated circuit as a platform for coupling device components. In fashioning the world of quantum information and computation for the future, qubits as building blocks have been realized in diverse settings — in trapped atomic and ionic systems, in photonic systems, and as flux, charge and spin qubits in solid-state systems. Most recently, the prospect of qubits hosted by topologically ordered states of matter has created a wave of excitement. The emergent degrees of freedom in these states are resilient to environmental coupling, thus protecting topological qubits from decoherence — the bane that plagues standard qubits. For the same reason, coherently interfacing the two types of qubits in a common architecture would prove challenging. Now, writing in Physical Review Letters, Liang Jiang, Charles Kane and John Preskill1, and, independently, Parsa Bonderson and Roman Lutchyn2 present schemes for coupling topological and standard qubits, thereby taking a significant step towards designing hybrid quantum-information-processing platforms that integrate topological protection with the gate operations and evolved protocols demonstrated in standard qubits.

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Figure 1: Coupled-qubit devices.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Smitha Vishveshwara is in the Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA,

    Smitha Vishveshwara

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  1. Smitha Vishveshwara
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Correspondence to Smitha Vishveshwara.

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Vishveshwara, S. A bit of both. Nature Phys 7, 450–451 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2014

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