The qubits were supplied by Diraq, a UNSW spin-out established by Professor Andrew Dzurak, and the know-how that enabled the University of Sydney-designed control chip will now carry over to underpin much of the work of the new company, Emergence Quantum, co-founded by Professor Reilly and Dr Thomas Ohki.
Professor Reilly said: “As well as good science, this is a a good commercialisation story, too, and is more evidence why Sydney is a vital cog in the global quantum industry.”
Lead author Dr Sam Bartee, who undertook experiments as a PhD student with Professor Reilly at the University of Sydney, is now working at Diraq.
He said: “It’s extremely exciting to be part of this work, to be involved in the development of such powerful technologies and to sit in this hotspot of quantum computing research. Sydney really is a remarkable place to be a quantum engineer to be at the moment.”
Dr Kushal Das was the lead designer of the control chip. He holds a joint position with the University of Sydney and Emergence Quantum.
Dr Das said: “Now that we have shown that milli-kelvin control does not degrade the performance of single- and two-qubit quantum gates, we expect many will follow our lead. Fortunately for us, this is not so easy but requires years to build up the know-how and expertise to design low-noise cryogenic electronics that needs only tiny amounts of power.”
Professor Reilly added: “Here we are showing the impact that cryogenic electronics can have on scaling up qubits, but we see many further diverse applications for this technology, spanning near-term sensing systems to the data centres of the future.”
Diraq CEO Professor Andrew Dzurak said: “This advance underpins Diraq’s goal of integrating our silicon qubits with classical control electronics in one compact package, opening the path to affordable quantum computers that consume much less energy.”