Quantum computing passes temperature barrier.

This is a very big deal. It seems like not much, but bear with me here. Two sets of researchers have managed to make quantum qubits work at temperatures above 1 degree Kelvin.

A team led by Andrew Dzurak and Henry Yang from the University of New South Wales in Australia performed a single-qubit operation on a quantum processor at 1.5 Kelvin. Separately, a team led by Menno Veldhorst of Delft University of Technology performed a two-qubit operation at 1.1 Kelvin. Jim Clarke, director of quantum hardware at Intel, is a co-author on the Delft paper. Both groups published descriptions of their devices today in Nature. 

HongWen Jiang, a physicist at UCLA and a peer reviewer for both papers, described the research as "a technological breakthrough for semiconductor based quantum computing." 

In today's quantum computers, qubits must be kept inside large dilution refrigerators at temperatures hovering just above absolute zero. Electronics required to manipulate and read the qubits produce too much heat and so remain outside of the fridge, which adds complexity (and many wires) to the system. 

At the higher temperatures described in the new research, control electronics could be placed right next to the qubits on the same chip. Instead of requiring dilution refrigerators that use isotopes helium-3 and helium-4, the system could be cooled using only helium-4. That should reduce the costs of building quantum systems—Dzurak describes the potential difference as going from a few million US dollars to a few thousand.

The big deal here is cost and complexity. Currently, quantum events can only be observed using a cooling system that costs millions of dollars, and each observation device needs its own cable. Because the control electronics have to be outside the cooler. That's what it takes to reach temperatures of 0.1K, that's -272.9 Celcius. Absolute Zero is -273 C and only reachable with laser cooling. That's where you get phenomena like the Bose-Einstein Condensate and other weird states of matter.

What these guys have done is made silicon quantum spin devices with the control electronics on them and made their measurements at 1.1 K and 1.5 K. It is significantly easier to make a cooler that goes to 1K than 0.1K, that last degree is very hard to get.

According to the really nice video that's linked at the IEEE article, this breakthrough puts us at the ENIAC-stage of quantum computing. It is going to be practical to build mainframes with millions of qubits that work at 1-2 Kelvin. They will only cost millions, not billions.

Now, millions sounds like a lot, but I know a guy who used to run a garbage hauling company back in the 1960s. His largest expense was truck maintenance. He was the first guy in Toronto to buy a big mainframe computer to track his vehicle maintenance. It cost a million dollars, give or take. He made his money back in a couple of years. That's the kind of leverage information gets you.

The type of job a million-qubit quantum computer would be able to do is decode the protein coat on a Coronoa virus. Like, fast. Minutes, not weeks.