Like the transistors in a classical computer, superconducting qubits are the building blocks of a quantum computer. While engineers have been able to shrink transistors to nanometer scales, however, superconducting qubits are still measured in millimeters. This is one reason a practical quantum computing device couldn’t be miniaturized to the size of a smartphone, for instance. MIT researchers have now used ultrathin materials to build superconducting qubits that are at least one-hundredth the size of conventional designs and suffer from less interference between neighboring qubits. This advance could improve the…
