Today, there are six major approaches to building a quantum computer: superconducting circuits, ion traps, neutral atoms, photonics, silicon spin, and topological qubits. These methods are being pursued by major corporations, including IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Intel, and Honeywell, as well as numerous well-funded startups. Yet despite decades of research and development and billions of dollars of investment, all of these approaches have faced difficult technical (and in some cases scientific) challenges and have been limited to the scale of hundreds of qubits in most systems, far short of the likely millions or more qubits needed for real commercial applications.
EeroQ's quantum measurement demonstration now establishes qubits based on electrons on helium as a viable seventh candidate for quantum computing; one that researchers have long believed could offer the best of all worlds in terms of qubit quality and scalability.
"This is a seminal moment for quantum computing," said Nick Farina, co-founder and CEO of EeroQ. "For over 25 years, electrons on helium have been identified as a uniquely promising qubit platform, but until now, no one had demonstrated the ability to couple to an actual electron qubit state in this system. Our result changes that, and it's just the beginning. It opens the door to an even more powerful qubit, based on the electron's spin magnetism that we believe will outperform anything available today."
The concept of using electrons floating on the surface of liquid helium as qubits was first conceived of in 1999 by researchers at Bell Labs and Michigan State University and published in Science, and later expanded upon by EeroQ's CTO, Princeton professor Stephen Lyon. The approach has long been recognized for its potential to combine exceptional qubit quality with rapid scalability, owing to its compatibility with CMOS: the same semiconductor fabrication technology used to manufacture today's computer chips and smartphones.
EeroQ's achievement, demonstrated through the strong coupling of a microwave photon to a single electron on helium, represents the fundamental building block required to manipulate and read out quantum information in this system. This particular electronic qubit is not EeroQ's endgame: it serves as the mechanism to read out the spin qubit state of an electron, which is expected to offer significantly superior qubit quality (coherence), further strengthening the long-term promise of the platform. As quantum computing enters a critical phase in which scalability and qubit quality will determine which platforms succeed commercially, this milestone brings the industry one step closer to the breakthroughs that quantum computing has long promised.
About EeroQ
EeroQ is a U.S.-based quantum computing company building a novel type of quantum computer (QC) using electrons on helium. Founded in 2017, EeroQ's unique approach to quantum computing leverages today's existing semiconductor chip manufacturing technology (CMOS), allowing for rapid processor scaling using a fraction of the resources most approaches require. EeroQ is also helping to create early ethical and policy guidelines to maximize the positive impact of QC. For more information, visit www.eeroq.com.
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