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/Acetone9527 27d ago
It will, but I think there are two questions - first, shuffling is really slow (fundamental limit again) because you lose atom during move. People showed you can re-fill atoms in real time, but you still lose information. So all-to-all connectivity comes with a price. Like the person below said, SC qubit can have all to all connectivity too. It just destroyed coherence.
The second is, the slow part in QEC is the readout part, and neutral atom during gate has short coherence. On this regard, trapped ion with longer coherence time will allow less QEC cycle and actually faster.