This short video, filmed at the APS March Meeting in Las Vegas, focuses on the developments in quantum computer technology at HRL Laboratories. As Eric Williams, the company’s director of talent acquisition, explains, HRL Laboratories used to be known as Hughes Research Laboratories. With headquarters in southern California, HRL’s achivements include the development of the first-ever laser in 1960.
Teresa Brecht, a research scientist at HRL Laboratories, then explains the company’s contributions to finding a fault-tolerant quantum computer for the future. She talks about the variety of semiconductor qubit-in-silicon that she works on, called the exchange-only qubit. This qubit, she says, is small and similar enough to classical transistors that it can be manufactured at scale – and has a similar control paradigm to classical computers too, in that it operates by turning pulses on and off.
Another advantage is that, relative to other qubit approaches, the exchange-only qubit largely avoids the problems of cross-talk – meaning that it can do individual exchange pulses with “five nines of fidelity, 100 million times a second”. Brecht also points out that HRL Laboratories’ recent Nature paper shares their multi-qubit results with 97% fidelity.
The silicon-based exchange-only qubit approach that HRL Labs has demonstrated at small scale, Brecht concludes, may be a very promising pathway towards operating a fault-tolerant quantum computer for the future.
