A quantum computer is like a finicky orchestra: each qubit is a musician who hears the slightest noise and loses their place. To play a complex symphony of computations, you need hundreds of instruments tuned in unison. Engineers have taken a major step: they packed more than 500 superconducting qubits onto a single three-inch wafer, like fitting an entire symphony orchestra onto a dinner plate.
The main problem with such packages is parasitic radio waves, which, like a draft in a concert hall, make qubits tremble and lose their quantum state. Here, the design was computed so that these waves are damped, and materials were chosen for minimal losses. Another trick: when cooled to thousandths of a kelvin (colder than outer space), different materials contract at different rates, and parts can warp. The package was designed so that the contraction is coordinated, like well-fitted pieces of a wooden puzzle.
The result: qubits in this package live for about 100 microseconds — a long life in the quantum world. Reading the state achieves 97.5% accuracy, and the qubit temperature is 36 millikelvins. This means that large-scale integration doesn't degrade quality: an orchestra of five hundred musicians plays as cleanly as a chamber ensemble.
Such a package is not just a box for a chip but a tool for mass production. It allows rapid testing of thousands of qubits and identifying the rare ones that perform worse than others, like weeding out off-key notes in a huge choir. Without this, you can't build a fault-tolerant quantum computer that can tackle problems beyond the reach of ordinary machines.
A temperature of 36 millikelvins is 8000 times colder than your freezer and a hundred times colder than the coldest point in Antarctica.
In the series "Devs," the quantum computer Deviant is cooled to a temperature lower than outer space, and its operation depends on perfect isolation from the outside world, just like the package in this article.