By Edd Gent
Publication Date: 2025-11-11 15:00:00
One the biggest challenges for quantum computers is the incredibly short time that qubits can retain information. But a new qubit from Princeton University lasts 15 times longer than industry standard versions in a major step towards large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum systems.
A major bottleneck for quantum computing is decoherence—the rate at which qubits lose stored quantum information to the environment. The faster this happens, the less time the computer has to perform operations and the more errors are introduced to the calculations.
While companies and researchers are developing error-correction schemes to mitigate this problem, qubits with greater stability could be a more robust solution. Trapped-ion and neutral-atom qubits can have coherence times on the order of seconds, but the superconducting qubits used by companies like Google and IBM remain below the 100-microsecond threshold.
These so-called “transmon” qubits have other advantages such as faster operation…
