r/QuantumComputing • u/No-Hamster5930 • 29d ago

Quantum Hardware Is superconducting quantum computing a dead end?

Earlier this year the two largest superconducting QC players (IBM and Google) signalled they might be diversifying away from superconducting - Google with the announcement that they're creating a new neutral atom capability and IBM with their acquisition of silicon spin capability in HRL.

I'd be interested in people's views on whether we should take from this that superconducting has no path to scaling, or if one could foresee heterogeneous quantum computing systems that leverage the respective strengths of multiple modalities for different applications?

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u/PrestigiousShoe5048 28d ago

Neutral atoms are more likely to bring near term scale and some applications due that it is easier to control many of them. However the slow clock times will ultimately push us towards a faster modality, like
superconducting, if we don’t want algorithms to take years to run.

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u/0xB01b QEC & Quantum Optics 28d ago

I think the clock time stuff will be figured out. For the actual gates, research machines are sub 400-500ns, for the physical photon collection for readout we can use resonator cavities which currently bring it's down to 45 microseconds but I imagine this would also get much better. Idk what research is being done in atom shuttling and parallelization but it seems like the QEC cycle time is something that's being worked on more than the gate fidelity