Challenges & Opportunities for Developing Superconducting Quantum Information Systems

Abstract

Developing large-scale quantum information processors has become a major industrial goal over the last few years. Of the many quantum systems available to tackle this difficult task, superconducting circuits have shown impressive results thus far and appear to be posed to scale up rapidly. In this presentation, I will provide a basic introduction to superconducting qubits, their fabrication, measurement, and coupled operations. Then, I will focus on some of the difficulties associated with developing superconducting circuits for large scale quantum information processors. Specifically, I will highlight the materials science challenges that are present in fabricating superconducting quantum bits and provide a historical overview of the field that shows the enormous progress that has be made thus far, but also highlights the major obstacles still faced.