Robert McDermott

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 superconducting qubit is like a finicky musical instrument: until you tune it, you won't get a clean note. But even after tuning, the pitch drifts. The culprits are tiny defects in the material that physicists call two-level systems. They're like invisible cracks that appear and disappear, throwing off the processor's rhythm.