A new article argues that the ability to move forward on developing useful quantum computers requires new major advances in materials science, engineering and fabrication. The authors call for new approaches from broad areas of science and engineering.

The study, published in the journal Science by an international team, surveyed the state of research on quantum computing hardware with the goal of illustrating the challenges and opportunities facing scientists and engineers.

While conventional computers encode «bits» of information as ones and zeroes, quantum computers breeze past this binary arrangement by creating «qubits,» which can be complex, continuous quantities. Storing and manipulating information in this exotic form — and ultimately reaching «quantum advantage» where quantum computers do things that conventional computers cannot — requires sophisticated control of the underlying materials.

«There has been an explosion in developing quantum technologies over the last 20 years,» said Nathalie de Leon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University and the lead author of the paper, «culminating in current efforts to show quantum advantage for a variety of tasks, from computing and simulation to networking and sensing.»

Until recently, most of this work has aimed to demonstrate proof-of-principle quantum devices and processors, de Leon said, but now the field is poised to address real-world challenges.

«Just as classical computing hardware became an enormous field in materials science and engineering in the last century, I think the quantum technologies field is now ripe for a new approach, where materials scientists, chemists, device engineers and other scientists and engineers can productively bring their expertise to bear on the problem.»

The paper is a call to scientists who study materials to turn to the challenge of developing hardware for quantum computing, said Hanhee Paik, corresponding author and a research staff member at IBM Quantum.

Story Source: Materials provided by Princeton University. Original written by Catherine Zandonella. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.