Alexandre Blais

An orchestra plays inside a giant refrigerator. The musicians are qubits, the elementary cells of a quantum computer. To play in harmony, they need silence: thermal noise drowns out the melody. That's why the heart of a quantum processor is cooled to nearly absolute zero — minus 273 degrees Celsius.

A quantum bit is like a tuning fork that rings at its own frequency. To find out its state, you place a microphone-resonator nearby. Usually, the tuning fork and the microphone are connected via a spring-like capacitor: sound gets through, but the tuning fork also starts vibrating from external noise and can get knocked off.

A quantum computer is like an orchestra where every musician must hit their note without going flat. But superconducting qubits share a common ailment: random charges accumulate on their electrodes, and the 'note' drifts. Engineers call this charge offset drift, and usually battle it for years.