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How will challenges in micro- and nanofabrication impact the development of quantum technologies?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2022

Steven Touzard Open the ORCID record for Steven Touzard [Opens in a new window]
Steven Touzard*
Affiliation:
National University of Singapore, Singapore Centre for Quantum Technologies, Singapore
*
Author for correspondence: Steven Touzard, Email: steven.touzard@nus.edu.sg
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The development of useful quantum technologies will heavily rely on assembling many sub-systems that exhibit quantum properties. These systems do not spontaneously assemble themselves into useable quantum machines: they rely on advanced fabrication techniques at micro- and nanometre scales. Examples of such techniques include the fabrication of electrodes and waveguides for trapped ions, of Josephson junctions and microwave chips for superconducting circuits, of electrodes for the control of quantum dots or the fabrication of low-disorder semi-conductors for the operation of Majorana Zero Modes.

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Information
Research Directions: Quantum Technologies , Volume 1 , 2023 , e4
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

The development of useful quantum technologies will heavily rely on assembling many sub-systems that exhibit quantum properties. These systems do not spontaneously assemble themselves into useable quantum machines: they rely on advanced fabrication techniques at micro- and nanometre scales. Examples of such techniques include the fabrication of electrodes and waveguides for trapped ions, of Josephson junctions and microwave chips for superconducting circuits, of electrodes for the control of quantum dots or the fabrication of low-disorder semi-conductors for the operation of Majorana Zero Modes.

The current state-of-the-art in fabrication has led to results going from early measurements of Majorana Zero Modes (Lutchyn, Reference Lutchyn2018) to the assembly of tens of qubits in trapped ions (Egan, Reference Egan2021) and superconducting circuits (Arute, Reference Arute2019; Wu, Reference Wu2021), as well as the manipulation of hundreds of modes in integrated optics (Madsen, Reference Madsen2022). However, useful quantum technologies are believed to require of order hundreds of logical qubits, which could require up to millions of physical qubits.

The challenge of developing useful quantum technologies will undoubtedly be tied to the challenge of developing new fabrication capabilities (Brecht, Reference Brecht2016). Hence, several directions can be considered to answer the question “How will challenges in micro- and nanofabrication impact the development of quantum technologies?” For example, what are the main axes of development that micro- and nanofabrication techniques must pursue to undertake these challenges? What are the current thrusts in academia and industry that are meant to address these challenges, and what results are they expected to yield? How can developments in conventional micro- and nanofabrication capabilities be exploited to addresses scalability of engineered quantum device? What are realistic timescales for such results to be obtained?

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Competing interests

The author declares none.

References

Arute, F et al. (2019) Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor. Nature 574, 505–510.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brecht, T et al. (2016) Multilayer microwave integrated quantum circuits for scalable quantum computing. NPJ Quantum Information 2, 16002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Egan, L et al. (2021) Fault-tolerant control of an error-corrected qubit. Nature 598, 281–286.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lutchyn, RM et al. (2018) Majorana zero modes in superconductor–semiconductor heterostructures. Nature Reviews Materials 3, 52–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Madsen, LS et al. (2022) Quantum computational advantage with a programmable photonic processor. Nature 606, 75–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wu, Y et al. (2021) Strong quantum computational advantage using a superconducting quantum processor. Nature Reviews Materials 127, 180501.Google ScholarPubMed