Qubits are notoriously prone to failure — but building them from a single laser pulse may change this
Scientists have created an error-free quantum bit, or qubit, from a single pulse of light, raising hopes for a light-based room-temperature quantum computer in the future. While bits in classical computers store information as either 1 or 0, qubits in quantum computers can encode information as a superposition of 1 and 0, meaning one qubit can adopt both states simultaneously. When quantum computers have millions of qubits in the future, they will process calculations in a fraction of the time that today's most powerful supercomputers can. But the most powerful quantum computers so far have only been built with roughly 1,000 qubits. Most qubits are made from a superconducting metal, but these need to be cooled to near absolute zero to achieve stability for the laws of quantum mechanics to dominate. Qubits are also highly prone to failure, and if a qubit fails during a computation, the data it stores is lost, and a calculation is delayed. One way to solve this probl...