Superconducting Circuits for Quantum Information: An Outlook

TLDR

Superconducting qubits have improved dramatically, yet scaling to error‑corrected processors demands new architectural solutions. The paper aims to chart how mastering quantum error correction will enable scalable, coherent, dissipative quantum processors. The authors outline strategies for integrating quantum error correction into active, dissipative superconducting circuits to achieve indefinite coherence.

Abstract

The performance of superconducting qubits has improved by several orders of magnitude in the past decade. These circuits benefit from the robustness of superconductivity and the Josephson effect, and at present they have not encountered any hard physical limits. However, building an error-corrected information processor with many such qubits will require solving specific architecture problems that constitute a new field of research. For the first time, physicists will have to master quantum error correction to design and operate complex active systems that are dissipative in nature, yet remain coherent indefinitely. We offer a view on some directions for the field and speculate on its future.