Keeping silicon quantum bits accurate while they work together could help turn established chipmaking technology into larger quantum computers capable of tackling increasingly complex problems.

The manufacturing technology behind everyday computer chips could help build larger quantum computers. Silicon spin qubits offer that possibility, but the precision they achieve on their own can slip when several are controlled at once.

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and their collaborators have now demonstrated a way to preserve much of that precision during simultaneous operation. Working with five silicon qubits controlled through a single shared microwave line, they identified a major source of control errors and developed a calibration protocol to compensate for it. Their study was published in Nature Physics.