All Abstracts | Poster Abstracts | Talk Abstracts

Is building a superconducting quantum computer actually feasible?

Andrew Cleland, University of California - Santa Barbara

(Session 4 : Friday from 8:30 - 9:15)

Abstract. There has recently been tremendous progress in the performance of superconducting quantum circuits, especially in single qubit T1 and T2 coherence times, as well as in quantum measurement. Simple implementations of quantum algorithms have also been demonstrated. Are these advances sufficient to consider actually building a quantum computer? I will argue that the answer is (probably) affirmative, although such an effort would still be faced with many challenges, including how to achieve high-fidelity tune-up, control, and measurement of large numbers of qubits. A highly fault-tolerant approach is also needed; I will describe the surface code architecture, which provides what may be the most fault-tolerant scheme that includes topologically-protected logical operations. I will outline the basic principles and operation of this scheme, as well as prospects for the medium and long-term future of this area of research.