D-Wave Quantum announces progress in development of high coherence qubits

D-Wave Quantum announced notable progress in its development of high coherence qubits, with results expected to have a significant impact on its future quantum technologies. D-Wave has designed, manufactured, and operated fluxonium qubits that have demonstrated quantum properties that are “comparable to the best seen to date” in scientific literature. The fluxonium qubit, pioneered by Michel Devoret and his colleagues at Yale University in 2009, has recently become an candidate for use in next-generation gate model quantum computing architectures. Given the growing industry interest and D-Wave’s expertise in building flux-like qubit quantum technologies, the company explored the use of fluxonium in its own technology development efforts. D-Wave has manufactured and tested fluxonium qubits in a two-dimensional circuit geometry. The measured coherence properties, with relaxation times in excess of 100 microseconds, are comparable to the current state-of-the-art for such qubits. In addition, the measured effective temperature of its fluxonium, 18 millikelvin, is among the best that has been reported in the scientific literature to date for superconducting qubits.